A Conversation with Incoming Women Donors Network President and CEO Leena Barakat

Leena Barakat, incoming Women Donors Network president & CEO. Photo: Efraín Villa

Leena Barakat, the incoming president and CEO of Women Donors Network, originally sat down with Inside Philanthropy on June 22, two days before the instantly infamous Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson ending federal protection of women’s right to an abortion. The day the Dobbs decision was announced, Barakat and WDN were ready to announce the organization’s response — the Abortion Bridge Collaborative Fund, a rapid-response fund “to build the emergent and emergency infrastructure required to ensure access to abortion care for as many Americans, in as many places across the country, as possible.” 

Earlier in June, WDN announced that Barakat, an activist, movement builder and current director of strategic partnerships at Tides, would succeed long-time WDN President and CEO Donna P. Hall at the helm. Barakat, a member of the network since 2015, has served as a member of WDN’s board since 2017 and is currently the vice chair. Barakat will assume her new position in September.

In a recent conversation, we talked with Barakat about the many transitions for WDN that her new job represents, the challenges and opportunities inherent in succeeding a long-serving executive director, her views on WDN’s “superpower” and some of her plans for the future, and the network’s plans for protecting abortion and other reproductive rights with the death of Roe v. Wade. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity and includes supplementary material in response to the June 24 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that ended federal protection for abortion rights in the United States.

You’re not just transitioning into the lead role at WDN, you’re also replacing Donna Hall, who has served WDN for 20 years — a potentially intense transition. How is this working so far, and how are you feeling about it?

Yes! Let alone the generational transfer, transferring leadership from a white woman to a woman of color [Barakat is Palestinian-American].

You’re sounding really optimistic.

I named these challenges right away with the search committee and the board and the executive search firm. And I thought a lot about it, and realized that that’s going to be the case for anyone coming into this position.

And when I thought about this further, I realized that if anyone were going to do it, knowing that the transition is going to be challenging for anyone, let alone with the dynamics I just named… if anyone’s going to succeed through this, I believe I can do it because I am uniquely situated. I’ve worn nearly every hat of each of the stakeholders in our network, having served on the board, being a grantee [in previous work in nonprofit management], and as a current staff member of another large philanthropic organization. So I understand, more or less, the experience of a staff person. This combination of experiences uniquely positions me, and relationship-building and building bridges across communities and networks is a superpower of mine.

You’re also transitioning from being a member of the board to an employee of that board. That’s yet another big change in the dynamic.

You’re absolutely right in that, and that brings me to my final point. I also serve on the board of the Donors of Color Network, and for a brief period of time, supported the search committee of that board to identify its next executive director, and I learned something that I think further strengthened my confidence that I can do this. And that is that when transitioning from a long-time or founding CEO, the challenge is not finding a CEO with the competence and skills and the background. That’s actually the easy part. Those are a dime a dozen, right?

CEOs who transition out [after replacing a founding or long-serving CEO] often leave for two reasons that have nothing to do with their skill sets and competence. The first is sort of expectation versus reality. The incoming CEO is sold a vision, they walk in, and they’re like, “Oh, my God, this is not what I expected!”

The second reason has to do with political strife internally, which is, I think, part of what you’re getting into, right? This has to do with the politics of acceptance and navigating political dynamics and change and transition. 

This is where I feel uniquely positioned to step in. Having served on the board and having been a WDN member, I am not walking into a surprise. I know what our challenges are, I know what our shortcomings are, I know where we need to focus. I won’t say I know everything. I think there will be some more surprises when I step in. But I know enough to be able to connect the dots and not have that sort of big shock.

What are those challenges and shortcomings, and how do you want to address them?

I don’t want to call it a shortcoming, but I do see it as a challenge, that WDN is a community of donor activists and doers. And within that, you have very natural tensions around, not so much the what — thank God we’re all aligned on the what — but very much on the how, sometimes. 

Then, add to that the dynamics of people who have different lived experiences and backgrounds. So those who inherited wealth, versus those who earned it, versus those who married into it, versus those who, you know, it came all at once through some sort of big event in their life. People have different relationships with money and with power, and that can bring out all sorts of tensions and emotions. Add to that different racial backgrounds, right? Not that there are racial tensions, no one would agree that that’s an issue [within WDN’s group of donors]. It’s more of an undertone of, how do we reconcile the painful history of our past with the values we hold today? And where do we go with our generational gaps? 

In my view, while these differences could be seen as an obvious source of tensions and challenges, they are actually our superpower. And I’m really, really excited to invest in that superpower and to use our strengths as a network to really grow, expand and demonstrate our capacity to become a national model for what a multigenerational, multiracial, feminist network can do to shift power and strengthen the power of the communities we seek to uplift, serve and strengthen over time.

Given the demographic makeup of your donor network — many high-net-worth individuals, many of whom I assume are also white — what is the way forward to bring more people into the network and to open them to the kinds of things that need to happen to effect real change? There are a lot of common assumptions about the limitations of wealthy white feminists.

One hundred percent. I carried [those assumptions] as well, and I do not have a lot of patience, so trust me that I would not waste my time on a network that I felt like I needed to go back to the basics on. 

I’ll share with you my very first experience at WDN. I attended this conference in 2016. It was on the heels of the election of Donald Trump, we thought we were going to celebrate Hillary, and lo and behold, he won. It was a somber weekend. And I walked into this room having never attended an event before for WDN. And it was, yes, mostly older white women. And I did the thing that I kind of always do in these sorts of spaces where I took a big deep breath, and I was like, here we go.

I was mind-blown at the brilliance, the intelligence, the progressive nature of these women who looked one way, but really, were talking in the right way. Their lived experience, their curiosity around the issues, their acknowledgment of their own privilege and will to expand beyond their biases, their curiosity to really go beyond what they understood and ask questions rather than have that guardedness shocked me. And it was like this magical space of multigenerational collaboration and learning and giving in action together in a way I’ve never experienced or seen before. I knew that this is where I wanted to invest my time. I wanted to learn from them, I wanted them to learn from me — and their openness to doing so and to go on a journey was incredible.

[Going back to your question about the way forward], it comes back to building deep connection with values-aligned women who are curious enough to want to learn from each others’ very different experiences and build that really strong bond. And trust allows them to feel safe enough to expand their knowledge and grow beyond their biases around getting the work done. Combining this trust and community with powerful resources, our model proves, leads to much bigger giving and much bigger action. And when they do that, collectively, they feel safer and more emboldened to do it at a higher level and more frequently. You have heads of foundations who are WDN members that fully credit their approach to award-winning strategies to what they learned within WDN. 

Where would I build on that? Influence. Some of that is already happening, but I want to really strengthen and formalize that into influencing existing philanthropic institutions to fix their practices and shift their models so that they’re not rooted in white supremacist and old, traditional philanthropic models, but toward models that are proven to benefit all, and really are shifting and sharing and strengthening the power of those who have been historically left out.

I think WDN has historically been somewhat intentionally quiet. And my vision is around it becoming bigger, bolder, louder and more influential.

Tragically, the Supreme Court has handed WDN and other organizations dedicated to women’s rights a real challenge to speak up and be bolder. What are WDN’s plans in response to the effective death of Roe v. Wade?

While this is something we anticipated, it makes it no less devastating to see our fundamental rights overturned. This is bigger than protecting our right to choose and the safety of our women and girls. This is setting a dangerous precedent that impacts every person who ever believed that their rights in this country were guaranteed. [The Dobbs decision] highlights what was always true in this country: that it was never justice and liberty for all, but justice and liberty for some. I’m proud to be part of a powerful organization of women with a 20-plus-year history of mobilizing its resources, power and networks to strengthen the rights of women, BIPOC communities and every person in this country who faces a threat to their rights.

In true WDN collaborative spirit, we are working with our network of activists, leaders and reproductive rights and justice experts to fill critical funding gaps in the field with the launch of the Abortion Bridge Collaborative Fund.