Fretting about who to vote for in our 2009 Leadership Awards online vote?

Not to fear, live from the Internet I was greeted this morning by a number of third-party bloggers advocating for various organizations.  Check out the following and maybe your decision-making about the organization best supporting our region’s women and girls will be made a little easier.

Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, a national foundation-led initiative, is excited to collaborate with The Women’s Foundation to bring you the latest news and analysis on women and poverty.

Spotlight is the go-to site for news and ideas about fighting poverty. And every Friday, look for our weekly rundown of the top news stories on women and poverty.

Earlier today, I wrote about how The Women’s Foundation and The Women’s Funding Network were featured on a story on CNN about how investing in women is one the best strategies for fostering economic recovery.

Today was a bright and early, but exciting, morning for us at The Women’s Foundation!  We were up early to see Linda Butler, who spoke at our 2008 Leadership Luncheon, talk on CNN’s "American Morning" about how her life was changed by a jobs training program at Northern Virginia Family Services supported by The Women’s Foundation.  This morning at 7:30 a.m., she was part of a report on how women’s funds’ approach to economic growth for communities is a model during the tough economic climate in the U.S.

Inspired – and alarmed – by my colleague Lisa Kays’s blog post earlier this week about off-the-charts HIV/AIDS rates in the District of Columbia, I read the Department of Health’s recent report.

The report is powerful for what it includes – and what it doesn’t.

These are hard times for many, but especially for women-headed families.

Much has been written about the overall U.S. unemployment rate, which rose to 8.1 percent in February 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But did you know that unemployment among women-headed families was even higher at 10.3 percent?

It’s that time again–for the Leadership Awards online vote!

A committed group of volunteers has selected the 10 outstanding Leadership Awardees for 2009, who are doing innovative, effective work serving the health and safety of women and girls in our region.  Each awardee has received $10,000 to help fuel their work.

As a follow-on to my colleague Gwen’s thoughtful post on the Rihanna domestic violence situation and the way it’s being handled in the media, I thought I’d throw in this piece from Feministing, about the reactions of some Boston teens to the story.

Well, so much for a break from the doom and gloom.  The latest update on the status of HIV/AIDS in Washington, D.C. is in and the news is not good.

The District now has a rate of 3 percent of its residents who are HIV-positive, a rate that surpasses that in West Africa and means that The District has surpassed the criteria for a "generalized and severe epidemic." 

Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, a national foundation-led initiative, is excited to collaborate with The Women’s Foundation to bring you the latest news and analysis on women and poverty.

Spotlight is the go-to site for news and ideas about fighting poverty.  And every Friday, look for our weekly rundown of the top news stories on women and poverty.