“You Have to Take Risks.” 8 Questions for Elisa Lees Muñoz of International Women’s Media Foundation

Elisa Lees Muñoz, executive director of the International Women’s Media Foundation

Elisa Lees Muñoz has led the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) since 2013, overseeing multi-national, multimillion-dollar programming to support women in news media around the world.

Muñoz joined the Washington, D.C.-based organization as director of programs. As executive director, she has presided over the launch of a $10 million reporting and security training initiative for women journalists, the IWMF’s Emergency Fund for Women Journalists, and the Reporting Grants for Women’s Stories initiative.

Prior to joining the IWMF, Muñoz led the Crimes of War Education Project, monitored the human rights of scientists for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and served as an election monitor for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in the Balkans.

We recently had the opportunity to speak with Muñoz about her career, the state of philanthropy, and other topics. Here are some excerpts from our discussion.

Who has had the greatest influence on you as a professional?

I am one of those rare people who have only had women bosses my entire career. I haven’t had many jobs, and I’ve spent the majority of my career at the International Women’s Media Foundation and worked under a number of executive directors here.

I learned a lot from each of those executive directors. And so I think that what has influenced me the most in my current role is having had that longevity, seeing other executive directors lead the IWMF, and learning from their successes and their mistakes.

What is the biggest change you’ve observed in philanthropy in the last five years?

Well, if I might go back a little longer, I think the philanthropy world really changed dramatically from when I started. It’s a lot more relationship-driven now. When I started out, there was a lot of “cold” grant proposal writing going out to foundations that we’ve never worked with. There were a lot more foundations working on the premise that you had to be invited to apply, and that drastically narrowed the scope of who we were going out to, because there were so many foundations where we didn’t have a direct link or a direct tie. 

Today, however, it is a lot more relationship-driven, although maybe we’re just in an enviable position of having foundations coming to us to talk about what we’re doing as opposed to going to the Foundation Center and looking up to see who funds what. I don’t know if that is still happening—at least not like it used to be, anyway.

I also think it’s more important than ever for executive directors to try to connect with each other, because there’s a lot of pressure that comes along with running a nonprofit, and it’s not just the fundraising pressure. Most of us get into this work because we deeply care about the issues on a personal level.

If you could snap your fingers and change one thing about philanthropy, what would that be?

Fortunately, I would wish that philanthropy would undergo the shift it is currently taking, which is this slow but palpable movement toward providing general support and away from niche-driven funding that forces an organization to fit into a peg that may or may not be what is the best thing for their community.

Now, I understand that donors and foundations have their priorities and their missions. But I think that it’s possible to make those matches without being overly restrictive, and without overly dictating what the organization is doing for its constituents, because we know what our constituency needs.

Which funders are you most impressed by?

I’ve been really impressed by a number of our funders—MacArthur, Emerson Collective, Luminate, Ford—especially right around the COVID pandemic. So many of them wrote to us and said, “If you need to transition the funding that we gave you to meet COVID needs or for general operating support, go ahead and do it.”

Luminate proactively reached out to us to offer wellness funds for our staff, and told us to use these funds however we felt was most needed. We work on really hard issues [like physical safety for women journalists and sexual harassment in the media industry], and most people working in the nonprofit world are facing incredible challenges. So I thought that it was just a really insightful and thoughtful gesture to have a foundation think about the well-being of staff.

What has been one of the biggest challenges of your professional career?

I think that the biggest challenge has come with taking a big risk and failing. And when I say “challenge,” I mean it was a personal challenge because I’m not used to failing, and having to say to a funder, “Look, we took this risk, but it failed, and this is what we learned from it” was very difficult. And I have to say, it was a lot harder for me than it was for the funder, which was a funder that was very willing to take risks. 

You have to take some risks in your leadership, and fortunately, for me, most of the time, they pay off, but when they don’t, it’s really hard, and you just have to trust. You have to be human and live up to the failure, be completely honest and frank about it, and try to learn from it. Respecting your funder enough to have these kinds of hard conversations makes a big difference.

What is one thing that you would say to nonprofit leaders seeking foundation funding?

It’s a marathon, it’s not a short game. We’ve sometimes spent years just trying to find that right connection with foundation, and then once we find it, it might take another couple of years to get any funding, which goes back to my statement about the importance of relationships.

You have a lot of possibilities to make these connections, and I’m just constantly thinking about how I can let a funder know that we’re doing something that might be of interest to them, and having that constant contact with them. And I don’t mean by a general email or our newsletter, but remembering a conversation that I had with somebody a year ago and saying, “Oh, and by the way, here’s something that the IWMF was responsible for.”

So I’d say to not always reach out to ask for money, but instead to think about how you can give back to your funders, either through information or through contact, by letting them know that we are keeping an eye for what they’re interested in. The best experiences that we’ve had with our funders are those with whom we have constant communication, and it’s not because they require it. I’ll tell them, “If it’s too much, just let me know and I’ll stop,” and nobody has ever told me to stop.

If you weren’t in the nonprofit field, where do you think you could have ended up instead?

Even though I went into the nonprofit world right out of graduate school, I thought about going into the State Department because I was always very interested in international affairs and international work. But I am not a company girl—I felt like I could not work for an administration that I didn’t agree with. I would have loved that life and that career, but I didn’t think I could pull it off philosophically.

What do you like most about living in D.C.?

From a physical perspective, what I love most is Rock Creek Park, which I’m lucky enough to live practically in, so you get the best of all worlds—the physical side and the professional and intellectual life of the city.

You have this rich international presence and an almost too-close connection to government, and you have these vibrant nonprofit and arts communities. I’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of these people through the IWMF. The embassies are all here, and we’ve built relationships with various ambassadors or communications officers from all over the world. It’s just really gratifying and interesting.