Eight Questions for Teresa C. Younger, President and CEO of Ms. Foundation
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Photo courtesy of the ms. Foundation for women
Teresa C. Younger is president and CEO of the Ms. Foundation for Women, the first national foundation dedicated to building women’s power to advance equity and justice for everyone. The foundation was created in 1973 by Gloria Steinem, Patricia Carbine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Marlo Thomas. Younger took on the top role in 2014 after Sara K. Gould left the position.
Prior to joining the Ms. Foundation, Younger did policy advocacy for women and girls in Connecticut, serving as the executive director of the Connecticut General Assembly’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Women. Before that, she served as executive director of the ACLU in Connecticut.
We spoke with Younger about her work, her transition to philanthropy, and her hopes for the future of funding for women and girls. Here are some excerpts from that discussion, which have been edited for clarity and length.
To start with, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and what led to your career in philanthropy?
I often say that I’m an Air Force brat that knew more about farming than feminism. I grew up a Girl Scout and I thought GS meant Girl Scouts, not Gloria Steinem. My activism from a very young age to now has always been around bringing voice to the voiceless and working in the field. I started a nonprofit 20-plus years ago, moved into the ACLU so that I could do policy work, and then worked in state government for seven and a half years advocating on policies for women and girls in Connecticut. And I thought, I wanted to do something that was different from those kinds of roles.
My first real foray into philanthropy was in this role as a CEO and president of the Ms. Foundation For Women. It was so perfectly aligned for me because it required an understanding of the grassroots, which I had been very much an active part of. It required an understanding of what policy initiatives were happening. It required a look across the country and what was happening with women and girls and gender-expansive people. For me, it was all the right combinations — doing good in the world through a public foundation and standing on the shoulders of great women who had come before me, including Gloria Steinem, Marie C. Wilson and Sara Gould. I came in with the hope that I could stay connected to the grassroots while still leading on a national level.
You touched on this a little bit, but what brought you specifically to the Ms. Foundation, and can you tell me a little bit about your work there?
What brought me to the Ms. Foundation was the desire to do gender-based work and to do it from a perspective that was inclusive of all of the identities that women and folks have, and trying to amplify feminism in a way that I thought was reflective of what is now third- and fourth-wave feminism. I wanted to do work nationally, not just locally where I had been working, in the state of Connecticut. I could see the strength and the dynamic energy that women were bringing into the movement spaces, and I wanted to be able to amplify the work that we were doing.
So literally, I saw the job advertised. I had known of Gloria, had heard her speak, had heard about the foundation, and had attempted to get money from the foundation when I was in public policy work. And so it was really this idea that there was a leadership role that was national that could advocate for women.
It’s been an amazing legacy because the foundation is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. We were the first public women’s foundation. We are a feminist fund. And you know, those components are really important. When I got to the foundation, what I wanted to do was make sure that people understood that the Ms. Foundation funded grassroots organizations. It had always funded women and marginalized communities, but I wanted us to be intentional, unapologetic and bold about who we were funding. And so with the work of the board and the dynamic team at Ms., we were really able to center women and girls of color as a point of inclusion, not exclusion, and to really say this is the most underfunded group in this country, how do we make sure that we are funding them? Women of color are also central to everything — NGOs, civil rights and civil liberties movements in this country — so how do we fund them and how do we talk about it from a place of power, not a place of just needing support?
My job at the foundation is to change philanthropy more broadly to understand the work of intermediaries and public philanthropy, to make sure that women and girls — particularly gender nonconforming and other feminist funds — are adequately funded to move money to the grassroots, and to do that through trust-based philanthropy, which is general operating support that gets done year after year. We know that the change we need to see in the world actually needs to come from the grassroots and those who are closest to the problems. Women have the answers to help them heal their communities, but they need the support to push back on systemic oppression. We need to do that over time. Women of color can’t be the new thing for one or two years. We need to truly invest in their leadership, give them the money to pay themselves and their teams and to do the work they want in their communities over time, like 20, or 30 or 40 years, not just for a moment.
When we think about philanthropy more broadly, Ms. has only been around for 50 years. We have only been intentionally funding women and girls for 50 years in this country. Before that, women were not even thought about as a special interest group in most of private philanthropy. And so we’ve really seen this very significant change, but there really needs to be much more of a commitment. And our research supports that. We did a research report two or three years ago called “Pocket Change: How Women and Girls of Color are Doing More With Less.” And that was to reinforce to the field that there were not enough dollars moving to women and girls of color, and that those leadership models were using multiple strategies and working on multiple issues. So we don’t just work on women’s issues at the Ms. Foundation, we work on the issues that affect the lives of women in their communities.
Who has been the greatest influence on you as a professional?
Within philanthropy, the greatest influences have been our grassroots leaders who I get a chance to work with and to talk with and hear from. The person who has modeled for me and been most open to me about how you open the door and bring women forward in philanthropy has been Sarah Gould, who is one of my predecessors. But overall, I would say, actually, it was a white man who was one of my early mentors. His name’s Jeff Ackerman, and when I was just a wee baby college kid from North Dakota who was looking for a job on the East Coast, he gave me a job to help work with young people and to be a camp athletic director. Watching his leadership, watching how he developed people, how he stayed connected to people, how he worked play and joy into his daily life. And now, 30-plus years later, he’s still a presence in my life and still providing me with the guidance and the feedback and the support that’s been really important to me.
How have your experiences influenced your work?
I always say this is my heart work. And so many people, particularly people of color and BIPOC folks, we do our heart work. It’s something that has always been a part of us. So for me, I’m really the Girl Scout that wants to make the world a better place. I mean, if you cut me, I still bleed green today. But I just want to make the world a better place and this has really given me a chance. I started my career working in youth development because I wanted to work with young people who have the greatest visions for our country and what we want to do.
And then I realized that policies were not making it fair for them, so I pivoted to the ACLU so that I could do policy work. What I saw when I went there in 2001 was the strength of women from the South Asian communities and what they were doing after 9/11 to keep their communities safe and inform and educate their communities as we were seeing horrific attacks by our own government on many Napoli, Indonesian, Pakistani men in their communities. And so I saw the strength of women in their homes and realized I really wanted to make sure I was doing work that was directly impacting women in the state of Connecticut. And that’s what took me from the ACLU national office back to Connecticut, where I was able to run the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women. And that was really, what are the policies? And how do they affect our lives on a daily basis? How do we advocate for them, not just me, but getting other women to come and tell their stories, talk to their legislators, and run for elected office? How do we coordinate those women who are in elected office to make sure that they have each other’s backs? How can we get budgets to reflect the importance of childcare and healthcare and housing and food security in communities that didn’t have those things? So it was really an amazing opportunity to do that direct policy work on a state level.
And then philanthropy opened up with this opportunity. I had known I was ready to leave, but I didn’t want to go too far from the grassroots. I want to do something on a national level, but I also wanted to stay close to the grassroots. And that’s what the Ms. Foundation has enabled me to do.
What is it about philanthropy right now that excites you?
I think that we’re having these open and honest conversations, and philanthropy is accepting the challenge. What excites me right now is the idea that we’re really having conversations about systemic change, and that we are really challenging philanthropy — particularly institutions like Ms. and Groundswell and Third Wave Fund — to make sure that we are funding intermediaries that can move money quickly to the grassroots. That excites me. And that I am seeing so many people of color in leadership in philanthropy, more than I have ever seen. I’ve been in this work for eight and a half years, and I am seeing so many leaders of color in philanthropy who are coming from their lived experiences and an understanding about how they want to influence and make change. And also, quite honestly, I’m excited about what I’m seeing in the grassroots — people getting an opportunity to work together, to build together, to challenge together, and to know that we’re not going anywhere in this work that we have to do, it will be a line of generational change that needs to continue forward.
What, if anything, keeps you up at night?
Everything. At the same time, everything keeps me up at night. I think for philanthropy to continue to see the comprehensive intersections of the lives of the activists that are doing the work is really important to me. The other thing that keeps me up at night is the idea that we are going to start checking boxes around this success. We need to trust those that we are giving dollars to, give them the capacity and support that they need so that they can make the determination on how and where dollars need to go. We need to ensure that intermediaries are appropriately funded to move those dollars as quickly as possible. So at the Ms. Foundation, what keeps me up at night is being able to raise the dollars that we know our grantee partners and partners in the field need, and being able to stay authentic and true to the work that we are doing, and moving philanthropy to be consistent with what we think is most important.
If you could snap your fingers and change one thing about philanthropy right now, what would it be?
How many dollars private philanthropy is required to move. I think we should be moving many more dollars than the 5% of endowed dollars. We should be looking at 10% to 12%, moving those dollars as quickly as possible to the field and making those commitments over seven to 10 years.
Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
One thing I will say is at the Ms. Foundation, we have our vision on the wall. Our vision for the work of the foundation is that we believe in a safe and just world where power and possibility are not limited by race, gender, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, age or disability. We believe that equity and inclusion are the cornerstones of a true democracy in which the worth and dignity of every person is valued. And I can say it because it is in my heart and in my core, that feminism and democracy do not get to be separated out. And we have to call in all people to do the work we want to do for a safe and just world for us all.
