“Many women face multiple challenges during the pandemic, including increased family responsibilities, domestic abuse, job loss, poverty, and risk of illness in frontline jobs. Women are carrying out essential work like nursing, food service, child care or cleaning without adequate protective equipment, paid leave or healthcare. And women are taking on even more of society’s informal caretaking roles, even as their access to support networks, social services and reproductive healthcare diminish.
Black women and other women of color, women who are poor, undocumented, LGBTQ+, those who have differing abilities, are elderly or homeless, girls, and people who don’t conform to the gender binary often face barriers to wellness during normal times. The pandemic has put them at greater risk.
Yet members of these diverse communities also hold deep experience in community organizing and social justice movements. How are funders and other nonprofits stepping up to fill the gaps in public support for these groups, catalyze their leadership, and go beyond business as usual? Here, we take a look at a range of recent efforts by philanthropy to support the needs of U.S. women in the face of COVID-19. (An earlier post explored funder support for girls in the Global South.) A strong national network of women’s funders has been at the forefront of this activity, and many other philanthropic players have pitched in. General operating support and leadership by impacted communities are recurring themes in urgent work now unfolding across the United States.”
Read the full story in Inside Philanthropy.
