Feeling a bit left out since it’s Super Tuesday but we have to wait another week to vote?  Antsy to have your say?  Adamantly insisting that you should be voting today, even though you shouldn’t?  All those Facebook SuperPoke election options have you longing to participate in a democratic process?

Never fear, The Women’s Foundation is here.  We’ll let you vote today in our online Leadership Awards vote, no matter who you are or where you live.  We don’t even care if you’re registered or not and we won’t ask to see ID.

If you have an opinion about changing communities to improve the lives of women and girls, we have an online ballot for you!

The winning organization will win a $5,000 award, and you’ll come away with the empowered feeling of anyone anywhere else who has been to the polls.

For a little inspiration on the matter, Seth Godin has a great post today featuring lessons from voting.

Check it out, and then put his list to the test by participating in our poll.

Because it’s Super Tuesday, and there’s no sense feeling left out.  Vote now.

The primaries aren’t the only elections where women can really make a difference. 

Starting today and going through February 15, anyone interested can contribute their voice to an online vote for one of eight nonprofits that they think is doing the most to improve the health and safety of women and girls throughout the Washington metropolitan area.

The eight organizations are The Women’s Foundation’s 2007 Leadership Awardees, selected for $10,000 awards because of their effective, innovative work on behalf of women and girls.

The winner of the online vote will win an additional award of $5,000 to support their work.

It’s all part of The Women’s Foundation’s efforts to make philanthropy accessible to everyone, much like The Case Foundation is doing through its new experimental online fundraising contest.  The Case Foundation is hosting the contest largely to raise awareness about different online fundraising tools.

We’re doing it to make you aware of the excellent work being done by organizations right here in our community, and to inform and gather feedback about the strategies and approaches viewed as the most effective in improving the lives of women and girls.

So, what do you think will make the greatest impact on the health and safety of women and girls? 

Providing mental health services to low-income families?  Training to help identify and assist children that have been coerced into prostitution?  Support for women affected by cancer or HIV/AIDS?  Empowering women through training and seminars in self-esteem, health, effective parenting?  Providing funding to help women who couldn’t otherwise afford to have an abortion?

Read about the realities of the health and safety of women and girls in our region, and then have your say today in our online vote, and help support work that you really believe in.  That, after all, is what effective philanthropy is all about!

Anyone can vote!  Vote now through February 15, 2008! 

And, if you’d like to share your thoughts about what strategy you support and why, email me (lkays@wawf.org) to discuss being a guest blogger or leave a note in comments! 

Also, drop me a line if you’re interested in volunteering to serve on the next Leadership Awards Committee.  Not only do you get to support and learn about awesome organizations like these, but it’s fun!

Bummed that the writer’s strike meant no Golden Globes this year?  Miss the glitz and glamor of the red carpet?

Well, we may not have glitz and glamor, but we do have an awards process for you!  And this time, you’re invited to be part of the academy…the academy of social change!

It’s our way of rolling out the red carpet to you!

Visit us from February 1-15th and vote for the 2007 Leadership Awardee that you think stands to make the greatest long-term impact on the lives of women and girls in our region. 

It’s the "People’s Choice of Philanthropy" and it’s all about social change–long-term, true change in social structures, institutions and processes that permanently address the root causes that foster inequity.

We’ve got eight outsanding organizations that are all doing effective, life-changing work for women and girls in the area of health and safety for you to learn about, choose from and then vote on. 

The 2007 Leadership Awards Committee has already done the leg work for you, researching and interviewing organizations, going on site visits and engaging in serious deliberations to get to this pool of eight outstanding awardees.

Now it’s your turn to weigh in on an even tougher decision–which among them stands the best chance of contributing positively to the women and girls in our community.

Get a head-start here, and then come back in February to cast your vote!  As we’ve learned before, saying no to get to the yes vote isn’t always as easy as one might think, so do your research, get ready, and vote!

The organization that receives the most votes will win an award of $5,000 in addition to their $10,000 Leadership Award–all a result of you using your voice for social change!

And if you would like an email reminder to come back and vote, or if you’d like more information about how to be a part of the 2008 Leadership Awards Committee, just drop me a line at lkays@wawf.org.

For more information, view the press release.

But first, a little FAQ about the Leadership Awards!

What are the Leadership Awards?
In 1998, The Women’s Foundation made $17,500 in grants, in the form of Leadership Awards, to five organizations in our region. The first five Grantee Partners of The Women’s Foundation each received $3,500.

In 2007, only nine years later, the Leadership Awards Program gave $80,000 in awards to eight organizations, each receiving $10,000 to recognize their work focused on the health and safety of women and girls.

The idea behind the Leadership Awards is to recognize and bolster organizations doing amazing work–and getting results–for women and girls. A Leadership Award serves as a vehicle to promote their work and helps them leverage additional support.

In many ways, the Leadership Awards Program represents the spirit of The Women’s Foundation: to foster innovative, effective organizations that truly change the lives of women and girls, and to help deepen the impact of their work.

Who selects the awardees?
The awardees are selected by members of our community. A dedicated committee of volunteers vets applications, conducts phone interviews and site visits and recommends a panel of organizations for approval by the board of directors. The volunteer committee is open to any donor to The Women’s Foundation at any level–making it a public, citizen-based grantmaking process reflecting the diverse interests and experience of people throughout our region.

Jeanie Lee, a 2007 Leadership Awards volunteer, says, "It was an enormous learning experience, and I really appreciated having the opportunity of getting to know our community organizations that are doing good work."

Want to become a Leadership Awards volunteer?  Contact me and I’ll tell you all about it!

What do awardees do with the money?
The awards are not grants in the traditional sense. They are not funded to conduct specific work outlined in a proposal. Instead, a Leadership Award is an acknowledgment of work already accomplished and allows the organization to continue to build on those achievements. It says, "Thank you for the excellent work you are doing for the women and girls of our region. We support you in your efforts and we’re encouraging others to do the same."

Do Leadership Awards really make a difference?
As a result of this support, many organizations in our region have been transformed.

Deborah Avens of Virtuous Enterprises, Inc. cites The Women’s Foundation–and receiving a Leadership Award–as having been the cheerleader that inspired her to expand her work with women in Prince George’s County.

In 2002, a Leadership Award was granted to Tahirih Justice Center, and this year, their accomplishments were acknowledged with a Washington Post Award for Excellence in Nonprofit Management.

Consulting the list of past Leadership Awards recipients reveals many more organizations in our region that have grown and expanded their impact–in many cases due largely to that first recognition from The Women’s Foundation through a Leadership Award.

Who are the 2007 Leadership Awardees?
This year, The Women’s Foundation is proud to announce the eight 2007 Leadership Awardees, which represent excellence, innovation and impact on behalf of women and girls in the area of health and safety.

Congratulations to the 2007 Leadership Awardees, and many thanks to every member of our community for supporting The Women’s Foundation and making it possible for us to continue to inspire and cultivate leadership on behalf of women and girls in our region.

Learn more about these outstanding organizations.

Stay tuned for a public, online vote in the new year to give an additional $5,000 award to one of these awardees!

To learn about the Leadership Awards Program, click here, or contact me for more information on how to become a volunteer and get involved.  (It’s fun!) 

If you catch the staff of The Women’s Foundation in an informal setting, you’ll often find us joking and teasing certain staff members about their former status as cheerleaders.

Not in a mean way.  Let me be very clear, we have nothing against cheerleaders.  Just in that surprised manner of learning that someone that is now your colleague and in a suit every day used to sport pom poms.

Sort of like when you would learn that your elementary teacher was also a human being who went to the grocery store.  

It’s kinda weird, and a funny new image to have in your head because it’s so different than the one you had previously.  So anyway, on occasion, you’ll find us teasing each other about our mysterious past lives.

So, after all this joking around, you can imagine how pleasant it was for us to be cited, as an organization, as a significant cheerleader for a local nonprofit in our area.

Deborah Avens, who just started a blog about her work with women in Prince George’s County, noted that for her nonprofit, Virtuous Enterprises (VEINC, Inc.) The Women’s Foundation has been a tremendous cheerleader.

She explained how our Leadership Award, which VEINC, Inc. earned in 2004, provided the confidence for Deb to realize that the work she was doing was really valuable. 

She also talked about this with me when I spoke with her earlier this year.  She explained, "It helped me build confidence that our organization could transition from a volunteer organization to a fully operable organization.  It was a part-time passion and when I became a Leadership Awardee and started seeing the impact that The Women’s Foundation was making in the lives of women and girls, it gave me the support I needed to transition to full time."

As a staff member of The Women’s Foundation, and a Leadership Awards Volunteer this year, I was very much struck by this–by the power of a relatively small award ($10,000) and public recognition–to completely transform an organization.

Deb isn’t the only organization I’ve heard this from.  One of the nonprofits I visited as part of the Leadership Awards evaluation process this year (the 2007 awardees will be released soon!!!) hardly mentioned the money when I asked what the award would mean to them. 

Instead they talked about access to this community, to its learning, and to the public recognition and acknowledgment that would really make them feel that the work they’re doing matters, and give them the credibility they need to build even more support.

Looking at some of our amazing Grantee Partners, it’s always hard for me to imagine them questioning their value to their community.  That it wasn’t always just blatantly obvious.  The quality of their work is so astounding, and the impact they’re making is so significant–in terms of changing lives and communities.  It’s hard to imagine a time when they could ever doubt their impact, their importance, their contribution. 

But for many, The Women’s Foundation’s Leadership Award–or another grant–is the first time anyone really acknowledged their work and said, "Thank you.  What you’re doing matters."

Deb’s blog post, and the conversation I had during my site visit, are reminders to me of the value of programs like the Leadership Awards, that illuminate, showcase, recognize and give credibility to the amazing work going on around us that may be too "small," too unique, too hidden in a neighborhood or county we don’t tend to hear much about, to really be well known or well invested in.

And to encourage it–by bolstering those organizations themselves, and by encouraging others to adopt the unique, successful models that are working around them.

In many ways, it really is like cheerleading, I guess (Though I must admit I don’t know, as I’m not one of the staff members who ever was a cheerleader [far too lacking in coordination; also, fear of falling down]). 

It’s looking out over the field and having faith in the players, even when they’re doubting themselves.  It encourages them to play better, to stay in the game, and to keep their heads up when things look rough or it’s raining, and all the spectators have gone home.

It’s a constant reassurance that yes, someone is watching, someone is seeing, someone cares about the outcome.

It’s fitting, really, that The Women’s Foundation can play this role for nonprofits in our area-and particularly for those serving women and girls, which tend to be under-recognized anyway in terms of funding priorities. 

It’s fitting that we can serve as their cheerleaders, because that’s the role so many of them play for the women and girls–and families–that they serve.

Learn more about how you can become a Leadership Awards Volunteer and search out great organizations like VEINC, Inc. throughout our region.  Or, contact Lisa Kays for more information.

According to today’s Washington Post, there’s good news to celebrate for our region’s women and girls–a declining teen pregnancy rate over the past decade.

In Washington, D.C., Arlington and Prince George’s County, teen pregnancy and birth rates have markedly declined–along with those around the nation–and have inspired hope that programs aimed at young people–and especially young women–are working.

A few take-aways from the article:

• Investing in issues that impact women and girls works.  For everyone.
• To be effective, efforts require a unified effort across communities.
• Investing in messages and work that protects the health and well-being of women and girls does inspire marked behavior change.
• Efforts to truly impact diverse communities, such as Latinas, where rates are, unfortunately, still rising, requires approaches that view challenges, problems and program design through a culturally appropriate lens.
• Providing information and access to health care to young women leads to wise decision-making.

In all, a very hopeful picture about the power of investing in women and girls.

But there still remains much work to be done, particularly in our region.  In Montgomery County, teen birth rates crept up this summer.  Alexandria’s teen birthrate increased over the past decade, and experienced only a minimal decline in its teen pregnancy rate.  Rates among Latinas are rising.

Overall, however, a hopeful picture of how investing in programs, messages and people that improve the health and well-being of women and girls does lead to positive change that impacts not only those women and girls, but their families and entire community.

A great message to carry with me as I prepare for Thursday’s Leadership Awards meeting, where a group of volunteers who have been working for the past few months to evaluate and learn more about innovative, effective nonprofits that are impacting the health and safety of our region’s women and girls, will award eight of them with a Leadership Award of up to $10,000.

The news from this article is a great note on which to finish up our efforts this year–and to remember that the decisions we make about how we invest our money, and the organizations and issues that we support, do have a defining impact on the health of our community.

It’s nice to have a voice in work that’s really making a difference.

The Leadership Awards committee is just one of many ways that you can be involved in the work of changing women’s lives through The Women’s Foundation.  Learn more.

Wanna lose weight or get healthy in the cheapest, most easily accessible way possible? 

Many sources will tell you to walk.  Roads are free, after all.  (Minus a small taxpayer contribution.) 

But what if can’t walk in your neighborhood because the streets aren’t safe from harassment, or worse forms of violence?  What if they’re deteriorated or don’t have maintained sidewalks? 

Then your best, low-cost avenue to a more active lifestyle just disappeared faster than you can say "speedwalk."

I hadn’t thought much about this concrete correlation between neighborhood safety and women’s (or indeed, anyone’s) health until a recent conference call for Leadership Awards volunteers on women’s health in our region, where the speakers explained that a woman’s health (her ability to keep in shape and her weight down) can be greatly impacted by the safety of her streets.

The good news is that some of the greatest health risks for women in our area–diabetes, obesity and heart disease–are all diminished by a more active lifestyle.

The bad news?  That many of the women most at risk for these conditions are low-income women without access to safe streets on which to walk–the most economical form of exercise out there.  They’re also the least likely to be able to afford access to gyms or other types of sports or exercise that will enable them to maintain healthy hearts, weight and other benefits of being active.

This is what came to mind when I read an interesting post on Half Changed World, on Google’s latest attempt to tell us about our lives by measuring how walkable a neighborhood is. 

According to WalkScore, the site "shows you a map of what’s nearby and calculates a Walk Score for any property. Buying a house in a walkable neighborhood is good for your health and good for the environment."

This all seems to be measured by how close your home is to grocery stores, shopping, parks, etc.

I can’t help but do a little experiment. 

I calculate the WalkScore for the office of The Women’s Foundation, downtown in northwest D.C.  We get a 98 out of 100. 

This is good news, since I walk to work everyday.  Except today, when it’s a million degrees outside, but that’s besides the point.  I don’t think Google accounts for weather.  (Yet.)

Next, I try an address of one of our Grantee Partners, Ascensions, serving families southeast Washington, D.C., in Ward 7 and 8, a target area for Stepping Stones. 

Their walk score?  46.  A pretty vast difference, even when you consider that Google isn’t measuring for safe streets, the condition of sidewalks or traffic flow, and that they’re just considering access to stuff. 

I consider that not only are families in this area most likely not able to incorporate walking into their daily errands and lifestyle (the easiest way), but also how much harder it could be to access the services provided by Ascensions than it would be for me to find a similar service for myself in my neighborhood in northwest D.C.  

Meaning that walkability could be impacting not only physical health, but mental health as well.  Or financial health.  Or any number of other aspects of one’s life that are improved through the involvement of practitioners and specialists to advise, examine and assist. 

I can’t help but think that this situation would probably be repeated over and over if I tried WalkScores on our various Grantee Partners serving low-income areas, women and their families.

And how much lower they would be if Google incorporated factors like safety and sidewalks into their calculations.  (Well, it wouldn’t be the first time I was disappointed by Google Map’s accounting for economics.)

It definitely gives me perspective about my daily walks to work in the morning–which I will now stop taking for granted, even when crazy D.C. drivers almost kill me–and a new way of viewing our region and its development in terms of the perspective of the women who are–or aren’t–able to safely take a stroll on its streets. 

And the potential for changes made in an effort to improve the walkability and safety of our region and its streets–in all neighborhoods–to improve the lives and health, not only of women and their children, but all of us.

After all, we should all be able to take Bono’s advice and, "Walk on."