Women Who Light the Dark | Paola Gianturco & Kavita Ramdas | Talks at Google

With that, welcome everyone to today's Joint Authors at Google Women at Google event for the Global Fund for Women. It's my great pleasure to have Kavita Ramdas and Paula John Turco with us today. Kavita is the CEO and President of the Global Fund for Women and she will be introducing Paula.

Thank you Rick and welcome everybody. It's wonderful to see you all here.

Isn't it fun to be on this amazing campus? And thank you Googlers all for welcoming.

Us to your space and giving us.

A little taste of the Google life.

You might find you have some more extra visitors much after the event is over. So I want to thank Ricky who so graciously introduced us just now and many of his colleagues. We also had lunch with Josh and with Vince. I also want to thank some of our colleagues at Google. Larry Brilliant, who has been a friend and a colleague for many years when I was on the Advisory council to Save A Foundation and has done so much work in South Asia. Sheryl Sandberg, who has been a long term supporter of the Global Fund for Women and has been an active member of, I think she serves on the board of google.org and Linda Segre, who also has been somebody who's really been involved with our work here and our efforts to be able to work with Google. We're particularly grateful for the chance to share this incredible new book on the 20th year of our inception. And I'm particularly honored that for this occasion we have with us in our midst the founding president and the person who dreamt about making the Global Fund and turned it into a reality, Anne Firth Murray. And I'd like to ask her to stand and please be acknowledged. Anne and as many of you know, is the ultimate entrepreneur and has a long history of doing amazing things, now is a lecturer at Stanford and has just brought out her second book. Her first was actually presented here at Google. So we have a long history now, the Global Fund and Google, which I hope will deepen. I know that some of you who are here are longtime fans of the Global Fund for Women and don't need any particular introduction. But I also hope that there are Googlers amongst you for whom this is a new introduction. So I want to take a few minutes to say a little bit about what the Global Fund for Women is, the work that we do and the privilege that it is to be associated with it. As I have been for the last 11 years as president and CEO. We've had the somewhat strange honor of being the largest grant making foundation to support women's Human rights rights in the world. And I say dubious because we give away $8 million a year, which is but a tiny drop in the ocean.

Of need that is out there and certainly not what one thinks of nowadays.

In the world of philanthropy. When you preface it with the word large, it usually has billions and not millions at the end of it. But in fact, it turns out that the Global Fund for Women, 20 years later, after our founders imagined and understood how great the need was for women's organizations to have access to a source of flexible general operating support grants in order to be able to take women's initiative, creativity and innovation to new heights and to really translate their ability and their imagination into profound change in their own communities. The need for resources for women's organizations remains huge. Last year, some over $90 billion of private US philanthropy went into various different causes. Only 6.7% of those resources went directly to organizations serving women and girls. In that context, an organization that gives away $8 million a year exclusively to women led initiatives working to end poverty, working to fight violence, working to end injustice, build peace, advance education, and make sure that women and girls can take their rightful place as citizens and equal partners in the work that we all have to do is in fact extraordinary. This year alone, as I mentioned, we've awarded $8.2 million worth of grants to women's organizations in 119 countries. In our 20 year history, we've awarded more than $58 million to 3,500 women's.

Organizations in 166 countries.

So that's quite an achievement. Our work as a global movement for change is really, we see ourselves as a network of women and men who work together to advance a movement that.

Is really a shared effort and an.

Effort that is not, that doesn't have.

A headquarters in any one particular part of the world.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirini Badi said a few years ago in an interview with her that I was fortunate to be leading. She said, you know, the feminist, there is no headquarters for the feminist movement in Iran, but there is a branch in every household. The Global Fund for Women would like to think that we have helped seed those branches in many, many different parts of the world and that the roots are strong and that they are growing. We are a community and I think it's a community that we hope to.

Be growing over time.

We are also a grant making organization that raises every penny that we give away. And I think from our very inception we've had a very clear understanding that the raising of resources and mobilizing those resources in order to support women's rights is as key a part of building this movement for social change and social transformation as is the actual process of making those grants. One of our greatest challenges continues to be, as I mentioned earlier, that so few resources actually end up in the hands of women and girls. We are able to maintain our commitment to general, flexible operating support. With the help of individuals like yourself, we have now grown to a community of over 15,000 individual donors who, together with institutions like google.org and others, continue to make our work possible in so many different parts of the world. When you watch the slides today and Paola's presentation, Paula, who joined us as an individual donor to the Global Fund and then had the opportunity to see firsthand in her travels what in fact.

Women were doing with these small amounts.

Of money that are making such large amounts of change. You will get a sense of the incredible inventiveness, innovativeness, sheer determination, and the vision that women have for transforming their societies. I hope you will feel able to join us in this community. There are many ways to do that. Buying the book is certainly one of them. But becoming a donor and a supporter of the Global Fund for Women and local women's organizations, of which there are many and wonderful ones right here in the Bay Area, is a great start.

And you can find more information about.

That at our website at www.globalfundforwomen.org. and I will now have the great pleasure of asking Paola Gianturco, who has been a longtime supporter of the Global Fund for Women, to join us to take you on a little journey with her as she travels through the communities that she was able to visit as part of her research for this book. Eighteen of the 25 groups, as I mentioned, profiled in this wonderful and very vivid book are grantee organizations of the Global Fund. Many of them, like the Girl Child Network that she talks about in Zimbabwe, received their first ever grant from the Global Fund, helping them get started and gain legitimacy in their communities. Without further ado, I give you Paula Janturkar.

All over the world, local women are helping each other with the most intractable problems that face women and their families everywhere. Problems that make life dark. Many of them have almost nothing by way of material resources, but they have imagination, and their imagination lights the dark. I first began meeting women like these when I was documenting women's lives in 40 countries. And everywhere I saw little groups doing wonderful work. And the idea of doing a book began percolating, I thought, in a world so Full of bad news. Good news would be heartening because these women are being very successful. And I thought at a time when the international women's movement is facing big challenges, maybe it would help to know.

How much good work is happening already everywhere.

And finally, because women's organizations never have.

Enough support, I thought maybe a book would help encourage people to help support them.

A woman from Rwanda encouraged me. She said, show people the work we're doing. Show them that we're capable of helping ourselves. Show them that we are worthy of.

Respect and show them how to march with us.

And as I watched the first books come out of the boxes three weeks.

Ago, I thought, oh, Etienne, I hope.

I hope this book will do those things. I began shooting in 2001.

I interviewed and photographed 129 women in.

15 countries on five continents. And I'm going to introduce you to some of them right now.

Two stories.

First, about women who are dealing with AIDS in Africa. Zimbabwe has collapsed economically. As maybe you know. Unemployment is 80%. The average lifespan is 36 years. It's the lowest in the world. Inflation is 7,000. 20% of the population has AIDS. Traditional healers tell men who are HIV positive that if they have sex with virgins like these, they will be cured. A high school English teacher, Betty McHoney, who is here standing on her mountain, listened to her students stories after school. And she and six of her high school students founded an organization that Kavita mentioned called Girl Child Network. The organization has made child rape a national issue in Zimbabwe. The movement is led by little girls who are 6 to 16. 20,000 of them belong to this organization. Half, it is estimated, half have been raped. These are members of their executive council in their ceremonial robes. These are very important meetings. The weapon in this case is poetry. Poetry. Remember I said, imagination lights the dark. These girls write poems about their experiences and they recite them in public. The communities who hear them are so.

Outraged that they are mobilized to action immediately.

I'm going to read you a poem.

That one little girl wrote. I don't know whether to call him my teacher, Monica's husband or Pris's Sugar Daddy.

In 3A1 he kissed Teklar.

In 4A1 he impregnated Daisy.

In 2A2 he fondled Lucia's breasts in his storeroom.

I can't say only the books are witness. The teacher was fired. No rapist is immune to the little girl's attention. Even the most prominent people. This man founded a religious movement in Zimbabwe. The work is needless to Say, risky. But the girls have won support from business people and politicians, people in governments, academics, men and boys, girls and women. They celebrate their successes. I left Zimbabwe thinking, my God, I think they are actually going to bring a stop to child rape in this country. Dr. Grace Fambad, this is. She founded the Cameroon Medical Women's association in Bamenda, which is where she lives. In the northwest province of Cameroon. There is the highest incidence of AIDS in the country. There, people live on average on $5 a day. Antiretroviral drugs cost. Sorry, $5 a month. Antiretroviral drugs Cost $6 a month. As recently as the year 2000, people in this country didn't discuss AIDS at all. Grace's younger brother died of AIDS before he was 30. And she said, as a doctor, nothing I knew could cure him, but at least maybe I could help other people not be infected. And today, women physicians and nurses and community health workers train new mothers, train teenagers to be peer counselors, train community health workers who work in 30 languages. They trained traditional healers, like this woman who now knows she can't cure AIDS like this. She knows to send her patients to the hospital. And they trained traditional healers, like this man, who now belongs to an organization called Fons against aids. Altogether, the Cameroon Medical Women's association has trained a million people to understand HIV aids. The infection rate has dropped enough that they now can focus their attention on working with survivors of AIDS and teaching them about nutrition and how to live with the disease and on helping orphans of AIDS go to school. In Vietnam, women are working against domestic violence. This is a woman named Van Ang. She was a reporter with the Voice of Vietnam. The subject of domestic violence was as taboo in her culture as the subject of HIV AIDS was in Cameroon. What happened at home was considered private. Women were expected to obey their husbands. So many women told Van Ng that they were being beaten that she decided to start the first hotline to give emotional and psychological support in Hanoi. I should say that there is exactly the same amount of domestic violence in Vietnam as there is everywhere else. It's estimated worldwide that one in every three women is beaten. But nobody knew that until the hotline launched and it was swamped. In 2001, Van Ng started a non governmental organization to train women like this one to begin counselors. And over the next four years, they counseled 300,000 women. Today, their hotlines in 22 cities field 5,000 calls a day. Online, they are providing counseling to the United Women who are Vietnamese victims of domestic violence in the US in the uk In Canada and France. Last year, when I was there, they were pilot testing a support program called the Sharing Together Club. Women who were so traumatized that when they first arrived, they wouldn't allow themselves to be touched, turned on the music and began line dancing. They used stuffed animals to tell their stories. It provided a kind of fig leaf so that they could tell the truth about their experiences. Here, they're laughing because the counselor animal has reprimanded the husband animal. The women play games and they support one another. And as they begin to regain their confidence, they experience something they haven't had for a long fun. Today, there are six Sharing Together clubs, and more are planned. Things are true. Changing in Morocco since 1957. The Mudawana, the family code, defined precisely what women's roles were in Morocco. Feminists worked hard for 20 years to change this code. But Islamists. This is a member of Parliament, an Islamist, whom I interviewed. They argued that the law was based in Koranic law and couldn't be changed. In 2004, a different code went into effect. A new young king, Mohammed vi, this is he with his baby and his wife, announced that there would be 11 sweeping changes in the Madawana. I'll give you some examples. Now. Men can marry one wife, not for women must agree to be married and to be divorced. Sons and daughters must inherit the same amount. Daughters do not get half any longer. And in the case of divorce, it's a court judge who decides who gets custody of the children. The problem was that illiterate women had no idea that the law had changed. This is Naima Zetan. She started an organization called the Theater Aquarium. She called it that because she hoped that her theater would be like watching real life in a fishbowl. She wrote a funny slapstick comedy about the consequences of this new law, and she hired television actors to perform it, always in communities where the illiteracy rate was 85% or above. Prisons, factories, slums. I was in advertising for a long time. It didn't occur to me until I got there to think about the fact that illiterate women can't read a sign that says, come to our play. I spent two days going with Naima Ul Maki, who is here in the brown coat, into the slums and inviting people one by one. This is like traveling with the music man. There was not an empty seat in the house. She told me a wonderful story about climbing up in a mosque and taking control of the microphone that usually announces prayers and say, come to our play. Needless to say, the audience loves this play. Women are so excited to discover what their rights are now. And after every performance, Naima Omaki interviews people who have been in the audience to find out what they learned. And they learned a lot. In Argentina and Slovakia, women are finding freedom despite profound discrimination in Argentina. As maybe you know, Argentina was the first Latin America country to acknowledge same sex civil unions. But there is no enduring fears among lesbians who lived through the 1970s and 80s. Those women who are usually over 40, they know that it used to be true there. That difference was punished by death. So it's frightening for them still, as recently as 10 years ago, they were still persecuted and machismo is endemic. Three friends, Fabiana Tunez, Maria Montesano and Ada Rico, co founded an organization called the Casa della in Quentro. It's a safe haven for lesbians, but it's open to all women. It offers sanctuary and dignity and community. Its programs include philosophy and art and tango. Members advocate for women's rights by racing, writing and performing skits in the streets of Buenos Aires. Here, they're rehearsing. At first they wondered how they would be accepted. But Ada told me, women come close. Men applaud for us. They tell us we are strong. In Slovakia, it's the Roma women who are discriminated against. They are insulted when people call them gypsies, which, as some of you probably know, is the Egyptian word that means vagrant. But insult isn't the half of it. For hundreds of years, the Roma have been sterilized and banished and relocated to houses like these. And they've been killed. And yet this ethnic group is as diverse as every other ethnic group. This one also includes Charlie Chaplin and Pablo Picasso. The Slovak Czech Women's Fund is one of 17 funds that the Global Fund for Women has helped start to encourage grassroots philanthropy. Local women run these autonomous funds, and it's they who identify the projects that they want to support. For example, the Slovak Czech Women's Fund gives grants to an organization called Hope.

For Children, which runs the preschool for.

Roma youngsters and a program for Roma teenagers whose parents are alcoholic. Hope for Children was founded by a woman named Yolana Navarola. She spent most of her young life pretending that she was white. And then she saw Roma children like this one rummaging in a dumpster, and she realized that she had to help her own people. Here she's put on a blonde wig, not because she's pretending to be blonde, but because this is part of her costume as an angel. She wears this costume for the Christmas play of her preschool. I thought she was an angel. All year round, women teachers in Brazil and India are educating children who would never otherwise escape poverty. In Salvador, Brazil, Gita Canseso runs an after school program called Bahia Street. She grew up in the favelas in the shanty towns, and she knew that girls who grow up there have two employment options. When they're adults, the best option is that they can clean houses. The other option is that they can be prostitutes. Hita wanted more for them, and she knew education would be key. In Bahia, public schools don't offer anyone very much education. Teachers are so low paid that often they don't even bother coming to school. The students do go, even if there's nothing to do except hang out the windows. If they attend, their parents get an allowance that supposedly funds school uniforms and school shoes and books, usually spent for something else. Often, children in Brazil graduate from the 8th grade without ever knowing how to read or write. Bahia street gives girls from the favelas the academics that they don't get in public schools, plus classes like ballet and cartoon animation that helped them understand how to be disciplined. When I was there, the math students were putting on a fashion show. This is the minus sign model. This little girl began posing the minute I picked up my camera. She dreams of becoming an internationally known model. She said, beloved because she is brilliant and beautiful. The big news was that Juliana had just been accepted to study in a program that would prepare her to take the college entrance exams. And Dasa had just been accepted to university. An Indian teacher, Indrajeet Kharana, decided if the children couldn't go to school, she would take school school to the children. In India, as you probably know, people come from the rural areas into the city by train looking for work. Often they don't find work. There are not very many extra jobs. Those people live in shanty towns around the train station where they arrived, sometimes in houses that are made of garbage bags. Children like Rama sell newspapers that are used, newspapers that she finds around the train station. She shines shoes for commuters. I rode for two days with her on the trains, where she sweeps the floors for tips. Needless to say, in their efforts to find a way to eat, these children are really open to molestation and disease and drugs and prostitution. In 1985, Indrajeet first went to the train station stations with story books and chalk and chalkboards. At first, she held classes for 11 children once a week, but in six months she was teaching 114 children every morning, railway officials tried to stop her. That was a misuse of government property, they said. But she won that battle. And Today there are 12 train platform schools. You can see little clusters of children like this one on the train. Static platforms throughout Orissa. Children learn the three Rs in three languages while the trains hiss and screech right past them. Teachers use games and puppets to engage the children. They serve porridge every morning. It may be the only meal the children get that day. Once a week, a doctor comes and examines the students to be sure that they're healthy. Saturday is Hygiene day. The children are taught how to bathe in the drinking fountain on the train platform. And the result? There are lots of little streakers on Saturday morning zooming around. The result is that over the past 20 years, more than 5,000 children have graduated into the fourth grade in public school. They're academically qualified to graduate into the public school system at the fourth grade level. In Kenya, women have joined forces to get pure water that won't make their families sick. Collecting water, as maybe you know, is the job of women and girls in rural Kenya found water is almost always polluted, as you can imagine if you picked it up out of puddles. The country doesn't have a national water infrastructure, so there really isn't any alternative. As a child, Norma Adyamba walked seven hours a day to find water for a mother who needed it to cook rice and chicken and bread. Families often trade off schooling for their daughters. Instead of being starved when she was 21, Normal Co founded a non profit organization that today includes 41, 43, excuse me, women's groups that have helped their communities get 73 wells drilled. Wells like this. And on the day that they inaugurate those pumps, there is so much singing and praying and dancing. This is Norma in the blueprint, inaugurating a well. These women think creatively. They sell the water. 15 gallons may cost 5 cents, it might cost 2 cents. But somehow they save enough that over time they can pay the drillers on the installment plan for having drilled the wells after the well has been paid for. They probably use the money to buy goats or chickens or seeds. Some of them are growing rice, some of them are growing corn. Sometimes they get wells drilled on the school grounds. Schools don't have plumbing, but now the kids can wash their hands before lunch. An even bigger change is that the girls now can pump water on the schoolyard after class and carry it home. They're back in school. Women in Cambodia are thwarting sex Traffickers. Many women are recruited by sex traffickers who promise a good job. As this woman told me she had been. What the recruiters don't say is that that can mean being locked into a Bangkok brothel. A good job is what you need if you're working in a factory in Cambodia and the factory is about to be closed because production is moving to China. Or if you're one of the single mothers who heads a quarter of all Cambodian families. Although some women are trafficked out of the country, in fact a large number of them are put to work in Phnom Penh. 20% of all of the tourists to Cambodia, 20% are sex tourists. A doctor, Penn Rixie was one of the women who co founded an organization called Stray Khmer. It means Cambodian women. They help their rural sisters become financially self sufficient so they are not so vulnerable to the promise of a good job. Stray Khmer gives microloans to women who grow mushrooms, who raise pigs, who may buy a water pump so that they can flood their fields and grow rice. Stray Khmer also trains midwives. 30% of all births in Cambodia happen at home. So there is a big demand for their services. But there's also a need for doctors. And three times a week Penricse goes out to the villages and conducts a mobile clinic. I went with her. In three hours she examined. Guess how many people you're shaking your heads? 150 patients. I had never seen anything like it. In three hours, 150 people.

In Nicaragua and Nepal, three groups are.

Teaching women to do work that women are usually not allowed to do. Those jobs offer more opportunity and more income than women usually can access. In Nicaragua, signs like this say women working trainees at Mujeres constructores are learning how to do welding. They're learning how to be carpenters and how to be electricians. Mary Gonzalez told me how after she had after Hurricane Mitch, she built six houses for single mothers. And then because she was a single mother, she built one for herself. She said, I was so poor I didn't even have a spoon. But I was so happy because I had a house that it didn't matter. In Nepal, Sangeeta Narola founded a non profit that's named Swati. It's named for the Hindu goddess of female energy. Swati empowers Nepalese women to be entrepreneurs. Sangeeta started with a revolutionary idea. She talked to the women in Kathmandu and discovered that they were afraid of riding in taxicabs that were driven by men. Sangeeta said, let's teach women how to drive Taxicabs. I photographed their newest graduates. These are they. They were receiving their first commercial licenses. All dressed in navy blue uniforms that had been made by one of them who had on the side started a tailoring business. Very entrepreneurial. This is Lucky Chetri. She founded Empowering Women of Nepal. She lived in the Himalayas. She knew that women could lead treks as well as men. They just weren't. Given that opportunity, she began training them. I photographed and documented the graduation of her trainees. Their graduation took place on Annapurna. I asked myself, what on earth was I doing taking my 67 year old body up one of the steepest mountains, mountains on the planet. But I will tell you something. I will always be proud of having done that. This was my view as we started out. You can't help but notice that everyone, all of these 27 trainees have their back to me. And they were kind of zooming ahead of me and picking flowers and identifying flora and fauna and talking about geology and things that trekking guides talk about. And then they just kind of zoomed off into the mist. They waited for me sometimes for as long as two hours while I huffed and puffed to catch up with them. After the graduation, Lucky told me about a father who had thanked her for giving her his son, his daughter, the training that she had received. And he said, her mother gave her birth. You gave her life. And I thought, that's exactly right. Stiff and exhausted as I was, I never felt as fully alive as I did in that moment. My final story is about a women's organization in the United States, Mobility International usa, whose delegates from all over the world in Eugene, Oregon for a three week leadership program. And one of the co founders of this organization is right here in the front row. I would love you all to meet her. This is Barbara Williams. Sheng, please stand up. In their own countries, the delegates lead organization that work with people who have disabilities. They themselves are deaf, blind or both. Some have polio, some have injuries, some have amputations and other disabilities that require crutches and canes and wheelchairs. This is Susan Siegel, who is Barbara's co founder. Both of them are recreational activists. Today, recreational activists at Mobility International USA help these women do things they could never imagine that they would be able to do. For example, they go camping.

They go.

Swimming, they learn self defense. As you know, women in wheelchairs are particularly vulnerable to attack. They go whitewater rafting, they master a ropes challenge course.

They go to the beach.

Almost none of them had ever been to the beach before. They get Media training they learn how to get funding for their organizations. Mao Betong was the president of an organization that works with the visually impaired in Africa. At home, her sons help her find her way to the village. She she is completely blind and she needs their help. In Oregon, she couldn't believe that she had just learned how to climb a tree.

She told me, when I get back.

To Lesotho, I am going to teach other blind people to climb trees. So thanks to American women, 30 disabled women, newly very confident leaders left Oregon knowing that they could do just about anything.

That's the last of the slides.

I just want to make a few closing comments. If we can have the lights and I can go to my next oh good magic on the microphone shift. As Kavita said at the beginning, 18 of the 23 groups in the book our grantees of the Global Fund for Women and have received funding some of them for a very long time. I have for a long time myself 12 years been an ardent supporter of the Global Fund for Women. When my first book was published, I gave some of my author royalties from In Her Hands to the Global Fund for Women. And this is book number four. I'm giving 100% of my royalties to the Global Fund. Now. I want to tell you why I made that decision. I not only like what they do, I like how they do it. For example, if a woman wants funding for her organization, she applies for a grant by writing a one page letter in her own handwriting in her own language. Period. I think all good ideas should find money that easily and accessibly. This is an organization that assumes it's their responsibility to vet the applicants. I thought that was a wonderful idea. Amina, I'm sure you have as I have served on non profit boards. It was a bold out of the blue that it should be the responsibility of the organization. Of course it should. Why should they have to go through bureaucracy and red tape in order to be qualified for grants? Second example, I like it that this organization treats everybody as equal. Donors, staff, executives, beneficiaries, the same. For example, I heard a wonderful story about a woman in Bangladesh who scrimped and saved to give them a dollar. She was given credit with exactly the same size type in an alphabetical listing as women in the United States who gave them thousands. In a just world, that's how it would look. And last, as you heard when I was talking about Slovakia, I like the fact that even though this organization organization is now the largest in the world, that's funding organizations run by women working on human rights they could rest on their laurels. They're not. They are founding seed money, giving seed money to local groups, local funds to encourage grassroots philanthropy. What a really wonderful idea. Of course local women can help each other this way. They just needed a mechanism. So to make that possible.

People ask.

What kinds of dreams I have for this project. And my dream is that this book will help us all understand women all over the world a little bit better so we can work together to tackle the problems that inevitably face women and their families everywhere. On. On the project website, which is www.womenwholightthedark.com There's a section called Shine youe Light. And part of that is all about ways that you can understand women everywhere through their products, through their music, through their books, through their fashion. This was made by a women's group in Damascus through their food. Lots of ideas on that section, part of the site. And then there is another whole section called act and it has as many ideas about ways that you can act in support of women all over the world, ranging from taking a volunteer vacation to giving money to the Global Fund for Women. I hope you will. Surely, surely it will take all of us to create hope and possibility for our world. Thank you for inviting me. I want to invite Kavita Ramdas to join me. Kavita will answer questions about the Global Fund. I will answer questions about the book and my work. We promise to answer all those things, anything. And it's your turn.

And I just want to remind people that we have a little bit of a time constraint. Paola and I are going to be on a radio interview at 2:30 so we'd like to take questions. But if Paola is going to have any time to sign any books, we have to kind of just balance that between that and the 2:30 time limit. So it's all yours. There is a mic coming around, so if you have questions, please raise your hand and feel free to. People want to buy your books.

This is good. I hope they want to buy books.

Yes, there's a question right in front. Here's the mic.

You said earlier that you've. I think you've granted 8.5 million so far this year. What is it? Or do you have in your long range plans, plans to become much bigger? Would you like to be much bigger and if so, what would that take? Does it take more funding from large organizations to you what is your long term goal?

It's a great question to ask especially since we've just been in the middle of a strategic planning process which was Great fun. I think we were all stunned to listen to one of our board members who runs an organization called the association.

For Women's Rights and Development.

They've just come out with a book called where is the Funding for Women's Human Rights? In which they pointed out that the.

Global Fund, with our little $8 million.

A year, is the sixth largest funder of women's human rights in the world. So yes, I think we believe very strongly and deeply that overall the resources for women's human rights have to significantly increase if we want to see the kinds of changes we want in our world.

We don't believe that the Global Fund.

For Women will be doing that by ourselves, although we do believe we would like to see what we give away double in the next five years. We also believe that we would like.

To leverage much larger funders, much larger resources, including those right here@google.org as well.

As places like the Gates foundation, to.

Encourage them and to show by our example that one, it isn't difficult to.

Find extraordinary groups, two, that we've done a pretty good job of seeding and strengthening them and they're ready to graduate to the next level of support. And three, that women's funds in different.

Parts of the world can take on.

The responsibilities that now are shouldered by women's funds like the Global Fund for Women and Mama Cash, and that they will bring the expertise and the vision and the ability to really do what they can do in their own communities to transform a culture of giving. It was Anne's vision many, many years.

Ago when it was first started, and.

It remains as true in terms of its ability to leverage change.

So that's our vision.

There's a question in the back.

When you provide the funds to the different ideas around the world, does it come with any kind of mentoring program from the business community here or there? And do you check on the businesses that you fund? Do they have certain goals they have to achieve?

We don't actually fund businesses directly. We fund non profit women's organizations that might run microcredit programs or might run business training programs like the ones you saw, Paula. And we actually. Our function, we see our function as really following the expertise of groups in those communities.

So they might ask us to put.

Us in, put them in touch with resources. But very often what we've learned is that when you are doing a business in Nepal, what you really need to know is the business environment in Nepal. And nobody knows that business environment as well as the people there themselves. And so women do need resources. To be able to call on the extension expertise they need, but they don't necessarily need an American expert to fly out there to give them that expertise. What they need is to be able to pay for the expertise and to be able to do so in ways that match their needs. And I think that's where the Global Fund for Women's grant making is so distinct, because we don't start from a premise that we have the expertise or the knowledge about the issues. We rather start from a premise of humility, that people in those communities are actually far more expert in an analysis of their own needs, and that what they really lack is access to resources. We do monitor every grant that we make, but we're not monitoring businesses. We're monitoring how women's organizations. And what I mean by monitoring is.

That they write to us at the.

End of the year explaining how they use their grant, explaining how. What lessons they learned and how perhaps they might have been able to use it in a different way or in a better way. If there are no other questions, I will allow Paula to take her seat and sign your books for you. And I thank you again for being with us this afternoon.