This piece originally ran on alliancemagazine.org.
A women’s funding initiative is about more than funding causes which others won’t. It’s about a different way of seeing women in philanthropy. Rena Greifinger, managing director of Maverick Collective, and director for Philanthropy at Population Services International talks to Charles Keidan about advancing gender equity and challenging the status quo.
Changing the way philanthropy’s done
Charles Keidan: What is the Maverick Collective and how is it connected to Population Services International (PSI)?
Rena Greifinger: It was co-founded 10 years ago by PSI with Melinda French Gates and HRH Crown Princess of Norway. The idea was to create a space for women to go ‘beyond the chequebook’ and engage deeply in the work that they were funding. The vision was to become informed champions for sexual and reproductive health and rights for women and girls, to use capital in a bold and flexible way to advance the space and also change the way philanthropy is done. PSI is a global health nonprofit working in about 40 countries. Our aim is that everybody has access to safe and equitable healthcare with a strong focus on reproductive health and rights. We’ve been working in most of these countries for decades. We are very much locally-led so about 95 per cent of our workforce is local to the countries and regions where we work. PSI was seen as a really strong organisation to incubate the Maverick community, and that’s because it has always gone where others won’t.
Does going where others won’t refer to the causes you work on or the approaches that your philanthropists take?
It’s both. The Mavericks are bound by a passion for advancing gender equity through investing in women’s health. We are taking on issues that are often being ignored or under-resourced, like cervical cancer which is an entirely preventable and treatable cancer. In the Global North, very few women are dying from it, but in Africa, for instance, it’s one of the leading causes of cancer deaths for women. Investment could eliminate the disease yet almost no one funds it.
Presumably, Melinda Gates realised that her foundation, despite its size, couldn’t do this alone and needed to work with a larger group of committed philanthropists?
Big traditional funders whether bilateral, government or a large foundation, like the Gates Foundation, are typically constrained in the way they can spend money and are less able to take on risk. Our view is that private philanthropy can invest in the most creative ideas and de-risk the investment for others by proven concept. It’s a venture-like mindset.
Could you give an example of Maverick members that have done that?
One of my favourite examples is a funder named Stasia Obremskey. She was a Wall Street banker who was passionate about family planning and reproductive access. She was one of our founding members, and she invested in a project in Mozambique to build the market for self-inject contraception, rather than women having to go to a clinic every three months. At the time a lot of funders didn’t want to fund it because the government wasn’t yet on board and there was a lot of scepticism that women could safely inject at home. With Stasia’s support, we did a three-year pilot study to test the viability of the idea. We were able to demonstrate demand, that it was safe and effective, and that women of course can be trusted to do this. We were also able to equip community health workers to support women in communities, which reduces the burden on the traditional healthcare system. We spent the next two years doing deep advocacy with the government, and today, Mozambique has changed its national policy to make the self-inject contraceptive available in pharmacies. Stasia herself went to Mozambique and was deep in the project work, that’s part of the Maverick experience. She’s since changed her career to working in venture capital for reproductive technologies.
That is a sophisticated intervention for an individual donor. Was that possible because of support and training you offer to members of your community?
Bringing donors along on a learning journey is really what makes Maverick different in the ecosystem of donor networks. Donors get a deep hands-on learning by doing, getting proximate to the communities and to the frontline leaders and PSI staff and partners. The first thing we do is develop really authentic and trusting relationships between the donors and the people delivering the work. They spend a lot of time getting to know one another, sharing their experiences, their passions, their interests, developing a mutual respect for the value they each bring to the relationship because a Maverick member, yes, she is bringing significant funding, but the expertise and experience of the people who are delivering the work is equally valued. We are actively building a generation of philanthropists to bring their A-game – authentic, accountable, and activated – which means that donors are their true selves, willing to listen and learn in the same way that our teams are. We build a mindset in our donors that they should be as accountable to their grantees as grantees are to them. That’s about being in it for the long run, being flexible and adapting when things fail, understanding that failure is an important part of changing very complex systems, which is what we’re trying to do. So, we have a whole learning framework with different touch points throughout the year and we also do very specific training when they go into a country. We talk about ethics and cultural practices, to make sure that they are coming in as a learner, partner and listener and trying to break down the inherent power dynamic between them and those on the ground.
Given the sensitive nature of the work you do, some of it must be challenging the status quo both at home and abroad. How do you respond when that happens?
This is where the power of working through PSI comes in, because PSI has been in this work for more than 50 years. We have very deep roots in community as well as partnerships with government all the way down to district level. When we bring Maverick donors to countries, sometimes we have meetings with the Ministry of Health. It’s always extremely welcome because this is an investment of flexible, catalytic capital in the country but through an organisation that is trusted and credible. Of course, there are anti-choice movements in the countries where we work but PSI only delivers safe abortion in countries where it’s legal, but we are working as hard as we can to deliver as much access as we can. We partner with organisations who are sometimes working against what a more restrictive government is doing, and that’s a way that we can support activist movements even in a place where we are also working with government.
I can also imagine conversations among Maverick members about where to put their efforts, particularly when many of them will be US philanthropists seeing challenges at home as well.
It’s a central issue for members, particularly since the Dobbs Decision in the US Supreme Court. What’s really powerful about the power of the collective is that these women have a very intimate and trusted network where they can bring conversation and investment opportunities to one another that are really advancing this space to overcome some of the hurdles being put in our way. For instance, in the last year, we had one member come to the collective who’s doing political advocacy work in North Carolina on getting women-progressive candidates into office to protect abortion rights there. She brought the Maverick Collective together with these women candidates to hear about what’s happening on the ground and then got members to invest or support them in other ways. Another woman in the collective co-produced a documentary film about Plan C, the self-medicated, self-managed abortion pill, that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. She helped to get about five other Maverick members to back the film and to go to the Sundance festival to talk about the importance of keeping self-managed abortion legal. Another Maverick invested in a company that developed an app which talks women in Venezuela through self-managed abortions at home because in Venezuela abortion is completely illegal.
How do you see the community growing and changing over the next 10 years?
So far, we’ve mobilised a hundred million dollars through direct investments from Maverick members and what we’ve been able to catalyse or unlock from bigger, traditional foundation funders. There are a lot of really exciting things on the horizon over the next 10 years. One is we have always attracted younger, newer donors to this space. Many of our members are brand new to this scale of philanthropy and we have a specific programme for next-gen donors, Maverick Next, so we are not just talking to the same small group of progressive women donors who already fund gender equity and sexual and reproductive health and rights. We are bringing in new donors and new dollars. The second thing I’m excited about is that we are now starting to fund outside the 40 countries PSI works in. For instance, in 2021 when the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, the Mavericks got on calls with women activists on the ground to learn about what was happening and were able to help raise more than 12 million dollars, in a collaborative effort led by Vital Voices Global Partnership, in a matter of weeks to evacuate women and women leaders from Afghanistan. Again, in Venezuela, when we learned that contraception is almost completely impossible to access for women, many Maverick members did a similar thing. Within a matter of weeks about a quarter million dollars went to grassroots organisations in Venezuela helping women access contraception. We’ve now got an entire Maverick programme called Maverick Portfolio, which is a feminist-designed fund that is funding both PSI and grassroots feminist organisations in three African countries to work on systemic barriers to sexual and reproductive health and rights, with a focus on healthy masculinities and transforming the role of men and boys. Where we were very focused on women and girls, we’ve now got a more expansive view of gender equality and investing in men and boys and masculinity. We’re never going to see the long-term change we want without men and boys changing and that masculine culture hurts everybody. When you see men unable to share emotionally, you have loneliness and mental health crises and the underpinning issue is masculinity. That’s not being addressed at all and it’s a very difficult issue to get funding for.
The other area where you’re making your presence felt is by challenging norms about philanthropy
itself. What does your work mean in terms of the role of women in philanthropy?
The patriarchy is embedded in philanthropy as much as every other system so women have often been left out of leadership in philanthropy. A few years ago, the stock image of a philanthropist was an older white man – Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and then Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. It’s only in the last few years that women have been seen as philanthropists who are taken seriously and it’s only a few. Women are telling us: ‘When I’m sitting in that foundation board room, I’m not being looked to or taken as seriously as my brother or my father. I am still left out of the real decision-making.’ That’s one side of gender inequity – typical masculine culture is affecting women in philanthropy. But there’s a young woman who just joined Maverick. She comes from a multi-generational wealthy family with a foundation. The men do the investing in the business and the women have this nice thing called philanthropy. She is a young woman who wants to build a career, and joining a philanthropic network, starting to get involved in her foundation is at odds with that. That’s a really interesting nuance in how philanthropy is gendered that we need to unpack, particularly for younger generations because if she and others like her decide to resist getting involved in philanthropy because it is seen as ‘women’s work’, then we are going to miss out on this incredible opportunity that we have experienced at Maverick to start them early. We need to re-evaluate what it means to be a woman philanthropist. We’re still at the early stages, and that’s what I’m excited to see accelerate over the next decade.
A recent Alliance contributor identified some serious issues of gender representation on foundation boards, and one proposal is to have gender quotas to make sure that women are equally represented at the decision-making levels. What’s your view of that?
My sense is that gender quotas do serve a role in getting women into leadership positions, whether it’s philanthropy, politics, business. It would serve us better if philanthropy had time-limited quotas on gender and leadership. But it’s not going to solve the problem of patriarchy on its own. We still have a deeply patriarchal, masculine culture within philanthropy that needs to be disrupted. Quotas would be one small piece of solving that puzzle.
And the work of Maverick will be another small piece?
Small but mighty is what I like to say. The late Anita Roddick who was a very early mentor of mine once said: ‘If you think something small can’t have an impact, try sleeping in bed with a mosquito.’ I always come back to that line when I think about Maverick and the contribution that we are making to the impact of philanthropy on women and girls.
