President & Chief Executive Officer; WWF

Posted on September 02, 2020

Washington Women’s Foundation (WaWF) is a strong and inclusive collective of informed women who together influence community transformation through individual and collective discovery, high-impact grant making and by listening to and respecting all voices in our community. At a critical time in WaWF’s history we are seeking an inspirational and innovative President & CEO to lead WaWF. WaWF believes it is more important now than ever, in this time of pandemic, economic devastation, and racial injustice reckoning, to find a leader who understands these challenges and has the experience and vision to help define WaWF’s role in addressing them.

The President & CEO will build upon a rich 25-year history of collective grantmaking that empowered women to see that by working together, they could learn and give with greater impact. With WaWF’s recent adoption of a strategic framework focused on advancing equity and becoming an anti-racist organization, the next President & CEO will help co-create new, creative and bold actions to fuel a thriving nonprofit sector and meet the demands of the moment.

Washington Women’s Foundation’s vision is to change the course of women’s philanthropy through the power of collective grantmaking. Through our collective grantmaking model, we leverage the resources of individual women to make large-scale, high-impact grants, benefit ting nonprofit organizations throughout Washington State. We pioneered the concept of women’s large-scale, collective grantmaking and our model has inspired scores of other organizations around the country and throughout the world.

As a Seattle-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, WaWF funds its operations and grantmaking through contributions, which primarily come from our 360 members who contribute a minimum of $2,500 each year. Membership is open to all who identify as women.

Since its founding in 1995, WaWF has made grants totaling more than $19 million. We collectively make grants to organizations in Washington State in five areas our founders believed were the foundational elements of a thriving community - Arts & Culture, Education, Environment, Health, and Human Services. Our current annual grantmaking includes grants of $100,000 in each of the 5 areas and additional smaller grants focused on specific issues.

WaWF’s annual operating budget of $1.4M fuels our grantmaking and more than 50 workshops and educational programs each year, almost all of which are open to guests and community partners.

Our collective grantmaking model and educational programming empower women with the knowledge and tools they need to become more informed, strategic philanthropists and more confident, skilled community leaders. WaWF members are influential change agents who lead by example in the community and continually enrich our collective with new perspectives. At our core, we are a membership organization with member voices that are engaged and invested in shaping WaWF’s future.

WaWF was founded by women who experienced exclusion from traditional philanthropy on the basis of gender, and established the organization to harness the power of woman’s collective grantmaking. Yet, we acknowledge that much of institutional philanthropy, including WaWF, continues to exclude many voices and it is critical that we work towards increasing the diversity of our membership as well as in our grantmaking.

We know that by bringing a broader range of lived experiences, perspectives and voices into the conversation we will achieve more strategic grantmaking, make sounder decisions, and produce better outcomes. We want our collective to reflect and represent the changing demographics of the region and know that creating a more diverse and genuinely inclusive culture begins first with ourselves. We need to understand and counteract the systems built and maintained by systemic oppression.

Our goal is to advance equity through building relationships, sharing power, embracing discomfort, listening and respecting all voices in the community in order to live…