Eight Questions for Sarah Haacke Byrd, CEO of Women Moving Millions

 
Image of Sarah Haacke Byrd, CEO of Women Moving Millions

Sarah Haacke Byrd, CEO of Women Moving Millions. Image courtesy of Women Moving Millions.

Sarah Haacke Byrd is the CEO of Women Moving Millions, a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating progress toward gender equality. Women Moving Millions is a community of 340 individuals, each of whom makes a minimum commitment of $1 million to organizations and initiatives that benefit women and girls. 

Byrd took on the role of CEO in 2018, after having served as managing director of the Joyful Heart Foundation, where she was responsible for overseeing the foundation’s national campaign to eliminate the backlog of hundreds of thousands of rape kits across the United States.

We spoke with Byrd about her career, her work with Women Moving Millions, and the growing role of women in philanthropy. Here are some excerpts from that discussion, which have been edited for length and clarity. 

To start with, I’d love to hear how you came to be involved both with Women Moving Millions and philanthropy in general. What was it that drew you to this field?

I’ve been working in the nonprofit sector for 20-plus years. I’ve been working in the space at the intersection of advocacy, education and human rights work, and that has really been the thread throughout my entire career. My parents were very civically active, so I grew up in a family where equity and inclusion and human rights were a part of the kitchen table conversations. My parents are teachers. My sister’s a teacher. And I knew that I was going to do something civic-minded and with a mission. 

I’ve been working in the women’s rights space specifically for about eight years, and came to Women Moving Millions in the fall of 2018. Prior to that, I had been working at the Joyful Heart Foundation. Working at Joyful Heart, I realized firsthand the deficit of funding going to support women’s rights work in the United States. So when the board of directors reached out to me, I thought, this is something I’m really passionate about. This is something that, being on the front lines of fighting for women’s rights domestically, I had experience with, and if I could dedicate my energies to driving great resources to the organizations and the amazing leaders pushing for women’s rights, that would be an amazing use of my energies, my time and my passion. 

So that’s what really motivated me to come to Women Moving Millions. It’s what brings me to this work, knowing that in order for us to make progress, to advance women’s rights and gender equality in the United States, we have to fix the quality and quantity of funding going to [organizations and leaders pushing for women’s rights].

Who have been some of your biggest influences?

Certainly my parents. My parents have been some of my biggest influences in terms of my path, in terms of the development of my values, and the things I care about deeply. My parents were both feminists, so I grew up in a very feminist, social-justice-minded home. So I’d say they had the biggest impact on who I am today and in what really drives and motivates my work. 

The last time we spoke, we talked a little bit about how women’s role in philanthropy is changing. What are some of the biggest changes you’ve noticed in recent years when it comes to women in philanthropy, and what do you think has brought them on?

Well, I think first, women control a greater amount of wealth than ever before — $72 trillion [globally]. That’s the greatest amount in history. And this unprecedented affluence presents a tremendous opportunity for the movement, so I think that’s one thing. I also think that women are giving in a fundamentally different way. I know last time, we talked about how women are flipping the script in terms of a different approach to philanthropy. I think that approach is [distinct] from traditional approaches in the sense that it’s rooted in listening, learning, humility and trust.

I also think that we’re at this incredibly regressive moment in the history of our democracy. I would say women understand what’s at risk, and I think that’s what makes women’s philanthropy so important and powerful today. I also think that donor circles and communities like Women Moving Millions are really demonstrating how, when they come together, the impact that they can have is exponential — as opposed to traditional philanthropy, with an individual giving to such-and-such an institution. Women are really combining and leveraging not just their resources, but their expertise, their networks, their combined influence. I think that’s how women are really modeling a fundamentally different approach to social change. 

That was actually my next question — how does women’s grantmaking differ from that of men? In terms of that, what are the benefits of this more collaborative approach?

Women Moving Millions is a case study of the combined power of women exercising their leadership and coming together around a shared purpose and vision to realize change. So I would say that women come together in community, and that connection, that learning, is critical to accelerating giving, to develop the confidence to be able to express their leadership and their voice, as well as to deploy resources in a really bold way. 

What kind of impact are you hoping to see when it comes to women being more active and taking on leadership roles in philanthropy?

Women Moving Millions has mobilized more than $1 billion to date for gender equality work, demonstrating the power of women coming together. The potential of a community like Women Moving Millions, specifically in terms of the leadership that we hope they take — we hope they give publicly, that they give in partnership, that they assume leadership. What I really love to see is women truly not just investing in their own leadership, but in the movement writ large. But I think in terms of individual leadership, what we spend a lot of time doing at Women Moving Millions is curating programming for our community so that our members can feel comfortable and knowledgeable to express their leadership through their giving and through their actions.

Obviously, with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, there’s been an increased focus on things like abortion funding, reproductive healthcare and women’s rights. Have you noticed any trends related to this and grantmaking? Are there more women giving to the space? 

Well, first I’ll just say that our members invest across a myriad of issues that impact women and girls, including reproductive justice and rights, climate, gender-based violence, and economic empowerment, just to name a few areas. We have convened as a community to begin the conversation about how we can leverage our collective strength and expertise to listen to both the needs of our community and how we can be of support and connect them to leading partners in the space, and also to hear how they are deploying their resources at such a critical time. So I think for us, what’s we’ve seen is our funders responding to the movement to provide funding to abortion networks and to organizations that are working in political advocacy spaces. So we’re really looking to prepare our members not just for the short term, but also for the long term. 

What’s coming down the pipeline for Women Moving Millions? Any upcoming projects?

So I would say that we’re responding and our members are responding to this movement with intention and urgency. But in terms of what our strategic priorities are, in 2019, our board of directors convened to really build on the success of our founders and to propel the organization to the next level of impact. We did this through the development of a five-year strategic plan. Our three goals that really serve as the north star for our work are to grow the collective impact of our community, to invest in the leadership and learning journey of our community, and to accelerate greater resources to support this work. 

While we certainly didn’t envision, in 2019, a pandemic that would strip overnight the economic progress that we had fought so long and hard for, nor did we really recognize the growing antidemocratic sentiment, our strategic plans still continue to serve as our guide. And so I’ll just give you an example of how we have responded in this moment, which really does fit into our strategic planning. So early on, recognizing the gendered impact of the pandemic, we launched the Get Equal campaign with a goal to drive a minimum of $100 million to gender equality work. We launched the campaign in September of 2020, and by the spring of 2021, we had surpassed our goal, raising $111 million from our membership community. In these times, our response is to continue to do what we do best, which is to encourage our members to give boldly, and to support them in their leadership journey at every step of the way. 

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been asking ourselves the same questions that we asked ourselves at the beginning of the pandemic: What is our role in this moment? How can we have the greatest impact? How and where can we encourage our members to drive their resources? We know that we’re facing this regressive moment that calls on us to be responsive, and as I said, to prepare our members for the long term. And so that’s really been our focus. There are so many unknowns in these moments.

There are a few ways in which we are responding as an organization: We’re convening as a community with leaders at the forefront of the work to secure women’s reproductive rights and freedom, to learn how we can be effective partners in this fight, to advocate for philanthropic and private-sector commitment to women’s reproductive freedom, to activate our community’s vast network’s expertise and influence, and to mobilize new philanthropy commitments to advance women’s power and influence in the United States.

My last big question — what about philanthropy makes you hopeful or optimistic?

I believe fundamentally and deeply in the transformative power of women and girls to shape a better future. I think that’s a vital part of our democracy. And what gives me hope in this extremely dark moment is the extraordinary work that I am seeing from leaders throughout the movement who I know are ready, who are brilliant and talented. Combine that with a community of women philanthropists who understand truly what’s at stake. I think that’s a powerful combination. That truly gives me hope for the future.