Grantees
Some recent grantees of the Susie Tompkins Buell Foundation:
Center for Young Women’s Development
The mission of the Center for Young Women's Development is to promote economic self-sufficiency, community building, and youth led organizing by providing peer run employment and leadership development opportunities to low-income young women and girls who are homeless, unemployed and are involved in the juvenile justice system.
Grant: $20,000
Ms. Foundation
The Susie Tompkins Buell Foundation supported the first Ms. Foundation Collaborative Fund for Healthy Girls/Healthy Women. Once again, the program seeks out innovative programs that benefit girls and young women from low-income communities, and engage them as partners and active agents of change in their communities. This program highlights the need for a national partnership among donors, practitioners, girls, young women, and researchers.
The second round of this effort will identify and document the ways that girls become active change agents in their communities and strengthen girl-only and mixed-gender programs that foster social activism in girls.
Grant: $150,000 over three years
OASIS
The Oasis was founded in 1999 to address the needs of the girls and young women of the South of Market (SoMA) area of San Francisco, who come from mostly low income, minority families. The two founders, Jill Weinberg Pfeiffer and Ly Nguyen, were working in the community for a teen community center when they realized that the needs of young girls were not being met by mainstream organizations. They started organizing activities for girls in the area during their free time and on weekends until they managed to secure enough funding to support themselves.
The mission of the program is to encourage and provide innovative opportunities for girls in SoMA to develop and demonstrate leadership skills and through this process build their self-esteem and ability to make informed decisions for their lives. They conduct meetings and activities for the girls throughout the week. OASIS serves approximately 80 girls in the neighborhood who range from 6 to 17 in age.
Grant: $30,000 over two years
WILD/Young Women's Leadership Program
WILD for Human Rights is committed to offering young women and girls the support and experience to be leaders and activists. They do this through human rights education, leadership development and training so that young women, especially disadvantaged women, can hold positions where they are able to influence policy at all levels especially in the areas of education, economic justice, violence and health.
The Young Women's Leadership Program is composed of various components such as a Youth Advisory Board; a Young Women's Summer Leadership Institute which is a free, five-day overnight retreat for mostly low-income, immigrant and of color young women from the Bay Area who are interested in gaining leadership and organizational skills; and Human Rights Education, extensive human rights education that is done at the local, state, national and international levels.
Grant: $30,000 over two years
The Woodhull Institute Think Tank for Ethical Leadership
The Woodhull Institute is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, non-sectarian educational organization that provides ethical leadership training and professional development for women. Woodhull's program encourages women to lead with honesty, respect, courage and compassion; to strive for the common ground in decision-making; and to share in community service. The Institute defines ethical leadership as the compassionate use of power with attention to Community Service, Mediation, Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, Financial and Economic Literacy, Effective and Ethical Speaking.
Margot Magowan, one of the founders of the Woodhull Institute, is establishing a "Woodhull Think Tank for Ethical Leadership." She sees the need to create a think tank that will help women gain media access and counter the influence of the right-wing think tanks staffed with conservative, older, white men. This think tank will serve as a clearinghouse for an extensive and diverse membership of women and men experts in a diverse range of fields.
Grant: $28,000
Young Women United for Oakland
The mission of Young Women United for Oakland (YWUFO), which is an affiliate of the Young Women's Work Project, is to creatively instigate new economic, educational, spiritual and leadership opportunities by and for young women living in poor and working class communities in order to end poverty. They achieve this through conducting research, organizing coalitions, and training young women to be leaders. The Buell Foundation is a part of a local collaborative of funders with a multi-year funding commitment to YWUFO.
Grant: $80,000 over four years
