the Power of 100 Women. The idea was to gather 100 Michigan power women and challenge them with some fundamental questions. “What should we be doing? Are we going to oversee the death of some of the things we hold dear and cherish about women’s roles and we could accomplish, or are we going to help create the new economy here in Michigan?”
The kickoff meeting was held July 1, 2009, with about 25 women taking part. From there, says Cassin, “It just snowballed. By the end of 2009, we had all 100 women.” She quickly corrects herself: “We had the first 100 women.” The group (full listing here) is now up to 122—on its way to something more like 200, she says.
“They’re presidents of banks, they’re entrepreneurs, they’re businesswomen,” Cassin says. Some are from the auto industry, some from technology fields. And, yes, some are “ladies who do lunch and have lots of money. It’s just a wonderful and eclectic group of women who are willing to step out in front and lead the change that I think this community needs.”
Cassin met with members of this growing group all over the state to learn what they felt were the most urgent things for the foundation to focus on. There were lots of great ideas, she says. “[But] the one thing that just seemed to grab everybody was, How can we help women take a leadership role in this new economy? How can we inspire entrepreneurs? How can we inspire women to build their businesses, to take a chance” so that they might become “the next generation of businesswomen?”
A strategic planning session last October produced three core goals, which I’ve summarized:
1). Change the way the foundation does business.
2). Do that by taking a more active role in rebuilding the Michigan economy and investing new capital as opposed to just giving money away.
3). Work to infuse these new ideas about rebuilding the economy primarily in young women in their mid-20s and 30s.
Cassin says these goals, which the board of trustees made part of the foundation’s strategic mission for the next several years, are central to creating “a new economy foundation” that approaches its mission in an entirely new way.
“We looked back, $3.5 million later, and said, ‘Where did this money go? Did any one of those 420 organizations, were they really changing the lives of women and children?'” she says. Some of them absolutely were, and the foundation will keep investing in them. But its whole way of allocating funds and evaluating how those funds are spent will be different. For starters, Cassin says, “We’re going to give larger amounts of money to fewer organizations. And we’re going to do it for multi-year. You don’t solve problems in one grant cycle. You solve them over many, many years.”
What’s more, “Any resources we give away now have to be invested in making a change in some young girl or adult woman’s life that we can trace and look back on and say the world is a different, a better place, because we allocated resources that way.” Did a group reduce teen pregnancy? Are fewer girls caught in a cycle of violence? Groups that can demonstrate real progress in those areas, she says, “those are the groups we are going to invest in because they are making a huge difference.”
But the biggest change, says Cassin, is that the foundation will now dramatically step up its giving “to individual women who are attempting to start a business or grow a business.” She calls this “re-injecting the entrepreneurial spirit to the world of philanthropy.” And, she says, “It just resonated incredibly with women.”
To that end, the foundation is forming its own angel investment fund so that it can take a more direct role in boosting female entrepreneurship. Each woman joining the fund will commit to giving $20,000 a year for five years to the fund (each woman joining the Power of 100 Women group commits to $1,000 per year for three years). She must also commit to work with the program, by helping advise or mentor entrepreneurs, or providing some other support. In other words, says Cassin, “They [must] put their hearts, their minds, and their pocketbooks” into the fund.
[Editor’s note, Aug. 26—The above paragraph was corrected to reflect the fact the three-year, $1,000 per year commit is for the Power of 100 Women group, not the angel fund as originally written. Details of the commitment to the fund were also added.]
Many of the details of what I will call the Power of Women Fund, such as how much would be raised, what exactly it would invest in, and how much would be invested in each portfolio company, remain to be determined. “We still have lots and lots of work to do,” says Cassin. Still, she says it won’t be that long. “Within 60 days, we are going to be ready to launch.”
Cassin says it is too soon to tell, but she thinks the fund might ultimately become the core of what the foundation does. But even that is only one step toward what she hopes to accomplish—which is to spread the inspiration for change to other non-profit groups. Cassin expects many of the women in her group to take the basic idea to the “10 or 15 other boards that they sit on.” And, she says, “if you can reinvent one foundation, you can reinvent many, and it just kind of spirals.”
It’s easy be inspired by Cassin—and, perhaps, to forget she still faces a load of challenges to pull off this vision. But the former hospice executive seems well aware of what’s in store, and seems to be keeping a good sense of humor about her task. “It’s been hard to control, frankly,” she says.
“It’s not like herding cats, it’s like herding lionesses.”
