Weekly Reads—March 10, 2023

Enjoy PEAK’s weekly roundup of timely insights from the grantmaking community and beyond.

“Judy Heumann taught me—and the world—a 75-year lesson in the power of humanity and dignity. She taught us how to live and lead with it, how to fight for it, how to embody and represent it fully and completely. Judy’s time with us was defined by joy, purpose, and consequence—not despite the fact that she had a disability but because, as she famously declared, ‘I never wished I didn’t.’ She was unafraid, unbowed, and unapologetic. She demanded respect for the rights of her community and marshaled a movement to secure them.” [more]
Darren Walker, Ford Foundation

“We [we need to develop a strategy for advancing women’s rights] by continually and collectively making the case that this is not a ‘women’s issue,’ this is a human issue, this is a community issue and this is a societal issue. Every family, workplace, community and society is negatively impacted when women and people of all genders do not have the ability to reach their full potential.” [more]
Elana Wien, SRE Network, for The Center for Effective Philanthropy

“Any organization that has an inclusive and equitable workplace culture knows that it takes time and that “consciousness raising” is one small part of the effort to sharpen analysis of issues and implement robust solutions. Grounding this work in a rigorous analysis of staff data (composition, compensation, engagement, recruitment, retention, et al.) and experiences can set an institution up to make progress toward equity over time.” [more]
Kerrien Suarez, Equity in the Center

A new report from Moody Analytics shows that highly qualified women are encountering barriers to career growth, and that dynamic is harming global economic growth. “Economic growth matters because it raises our average living standards,” Dawn Holland, one of the report’s authors, told Marketplace. “If you’re raising the average living standards of women—single mothers in particular—you’re also addressing some issues of inequality.” Click here to read the full report.