The mail carrier delivered another piece of mail addressed to the former occupant.
But this time, the soft-cover book, The Giving List: Women Doing It Differently, turned out to be full of interest—in particular, including its profiles of two Oakland-based organizations that are making a difference for women in the East Bay and beyond.
The section devoted to Rise Up starts with a story about its then-12-year-old co-founder, Dr. Denise Raquel Dunning. She was visiting family in Argentina when a girl, who appeared to be only about two years older than she, got onto the same train. The girl was carrying a baby and had a toddler following. They walked the length of the car asking for food and help. “I promised myself that someday I would do something for girls like her,” the profile quotes Dunning as recalling.
In 2009, she began to realize that dream, co-founding, with Josie Ramos, an organization that supports girls and women in fulfilling their dreams.
“We work with local leaders around the world to improve gender equality,” Ramos said in a phone interview. “[The goal is to] ensure access to education and healthcare.” These local leaders, she emphasized, have “lived experience. We are investing in them.” As Rise Up’s director of learning, she spends a great deal of time listening to those leaders and asking what the organization can do to improve what it provides.
In California, she said, Rise Up supports leaders fighting for sexual/reproductive rights, criminal justice reform and better access to housing and education. Rise Up also aids leaders who work with formerly incarcerated people, and youth aging out of the foster system.
One Oakland organization being supported by Rise Up, said Ramos, is the Family Violence Law Center. Sadia Khan is a policy advocate at the center. Her work focuses on forced marriages. “There are 9,000 forced marriages in California each year, and that number is increasing,” she said.
Although many have the impression that forced marriage is a “Third World problem,” that is far from the truth, said Khan. Another false assumption is that all of these marriages involve very young girls, while statistics show they involve women as old as 34. “Some are UC Berkeley graduates,” she noted. California currently has no laws regulating marriage by age.
FVLC is conducting surveys and listening sessions with women who have escaped forced marriages, accumulating more data that can aid their advocacy work, Khan explained. “We allow them to speak up without being shamed,” she said.
The organization is also actively pushing for legislation, such as Assembly Bill 2924, introduced in February by Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, which would ban state-sanctioned marriage for girls under 18. Petrie-Norris is quoted as saying, “The U.S. considers marriage under the age of 18 to be a human rights abuse, yet, right here in the great state of California, children are still victims of forced child marriage. It is absolutely shocking, it is horrifying, and it is time we finally end this outrageous practice.”
Another FVLC goal is removing gendered language from the existing forced marriage protection orders. “Both the U.K. and Ireland have done this,” said Khan. “Forced marriage can involve more than immediate family members.”
Initially, Rise Up’s work was concentrated primarily in Latin America, South Asia and Africa. But as the organization matured, said Ramos, it became apparent that, “We knew so many amazing leaders around the world…it would be good to do that work in our own backyard, invest in California in the same way.
“So many of the issues are the same,” she said. “They may look different, but the root causes are the same.”
Rise Up held its third California Leadership and Advocacy Accelerator in September, providing “opportunities to strengthen advocacy strategies, support policy systems-change, and advance gender equity in health, education, and economic opportunity for girls, women, and gender-nonconforming people at local, state, and national levels,” according to the Rise Up website.
“Rise Up Leaders will be able to apply for up to $100,000 in competitive grant funding to develop policy and advocacy strategies to advance gender equity across various social justice issues in California,” the website states.
Ramos said, “Gender equity work is so intersectional. We want to enable these leaders to make larger ripples with their work [and] find out how we can maximize those ripples.” Goals include better and more funding, more connections and more opportunities to connect.
Him For Her Puts Women in the Boardroom
In 2016, Jocelyn Mangan was doing a fellowship at the Aspen Institute that asked participants to “start a venture they believed would change the world.” Mangan, who began her career in tech in 1995, chose to create one that would put more women in boardrooms, naming it Him For Her.
In a phone interview, she described working for CitySearch, which then became TicketMaster, then Live Nation. She worked with OpenTable before its purchase by Booking.com, and as COO at Snagajob. During these years, she learned a company’s board “sits above the CEO, and makes decisions about the products and services we use everyday.”
Yet the path towards male/female parity on boards, while progressing, has been progressing slowly. By the end of 2023, reported 50/50 Women on Boards, women held 28.4% of Russell 3000 companies’ board seats—but this was an increase of only 1% from 2022.
Mangan interviewed around 100 male CEOs and board members. What she discovered is that although they were all willing to help create change, it was the process of finding new board members that was part of the problem. “Many of the stories involved private dinners, golf games, ski weekends,” Mangan said. “It was not a pipeline issue; it was a network issue.”
So, she set about creating networks of qualified women, connecting them with companies looking for new board members. To date, Him For Her has more than 8,000 board-qualified members, with multiple skill sets, in its network, and has helped place well over 100 women on boards.
“It’s not about diversity for diversity’s sake,” Mangan emphasized. “Many boards are missing competencies [in some areas]. This is a strategic move.”
She noted, however, that finding the opportunities remains a challenge. “These positions are not listed on LinkedIn. The whole eco-system tends to live in word-of-mouth. But that’s how we’ve grown,” said Mangan.
Here in the East Bay, Him For Her introduced Shirley Collado, president and CEO of College Track, to the board of StarRez, a cloud-based community management company, through its partnership with Vista Equity.
One male CEO told Mangan, “Our board used not to be diverse. Connections were easier—but the company was worse off.”
The Giving List quotes Mangan: “No one person or organization can do this work alone. Him For Her hopes to be the driver because it is a problem that is solvable.”
To learn more and/or donate to Rise Up, visit riseuptogether.org, or send a check to Public Health Institute, care of Rise Up, 555 12th St., Ste. 600, Oakland 94607. To find out more and/or donate to Him For Her, visit himforher.org, or send a check to Him For Her, 1889 Harrison St., Ste. 741, Oakland 94612. For more about The Giving List, visit givinglistwomen.com.
