When women’s voices are at the table

Over 40 years, Jill Reichstein OAM has overseen a transformative shift in the Reichstein Foundation’s approach, from conservative funder to one operating at the forefront of environmental and social change philanthropy in Australia. In this piece based on her International Women’s Day speech at Morgan Stanley in Melbourne, Jill reflects on the importance of gender lens philanthropy and how embracing different perspectives has shaped the foundation’s work and impact.

Since 1979, I’ve had the honour of directing the Reichstein Foundation as Chair. It has been a true privilege to work alongside, support and learn from so many incredible people pushing to create a more equitable and just world.

As some of you may know, we did not start out as the forward-thinking and bold funder of social and environmental change that we are known as today. We actually had a much more conservative approach to our work through the early 1970s.

That was until I took on my role as Chair.

At that time, I was involved in the women’s refuge movement. Somebody had loaned us a house in Kew, and we were filling it with women and their children, and it was chaos — we needed to be able to employ people who were better equipped to work with these women. So, I went to Meriel Wilmot of the Myer Foundation, and she came to the house and sat with the women around the kitchen table and had conversations with them about what their needs were. In the end, we employed two full-time staff to help them find ways of building new lives.

What we’d done felt quite radical at the time — we’d departed from the standard charity model and landed somewhere else altogether, and for me, it was a light bulb moment. We wanted to see change in these women’s lives, and in partnership with them, philanthropy helped make this happen.

At the same time, we were looking at the composition of the Reichstein Foundation board, which was all men when I arrived. They were businessmen and directors of companies — they knew very little of the social issues facing our society. So, as they started to retire, we began to appoint people who had a deeper understanding of the issues we sought to address. They’d worked with the Brotherhood of St. Laurence as social workers, for example, they were engaged on the ground, they knew what the issues were and how you could bring about change.

It just so happened we ended up with an all-female board, which, at the time, was quite a radical move for a foundation.

This shift in our leadership marked the beginning of our ‘change not charity’ approach. With experts from the community sector guiding our work, we began to move from addressing the symptoms of inequality and injustice to confronting their underlying drivers. We started backing organisations that were working to tackle systemic issues head-on, and this has remained the hallmark of our work ever since.

This is just one early example of how values, priorities and approaches change when there are different voices at the table. Specifically, when there are women’s voices at the table.

A more recent example of our belief in the critical and powerful role of women’s voices and leadership is our support for Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia (or WELA), which we have supported since its inception in 2016.

Since then, WELA has successfully supported the leadership development of over 70 women who have, in turn, gone on to influence some of Australia’s most important and strategic environmental campaigns and projects.

Most recently — over the past year — our core, multi-year support for WELA has enabled the organisation to almost double the number of women and gender-diverse people supported through its National Leadership Program and to publish ground-breaking research on gender and climate justice here in Australia.

As WELA’s work illustrates — and international evidence backs up — more women in decision-making ensures better environmental outcomes. If we’re to make the most of the opportunities for renewal presented by our current environmental crises, women must play a key role in leading and shaping a future in which people and the planet can thrive. WELA’s work has never been more important.

Given current attacks on queer communities, I also want to say a word about the trans community. We recently made a small grant to Trans Justice Australia to push back against moves by the Queensland Government to restrict access to life-saving medical treatment for trans youth because in our view, gender justice is about challenging the patriarchy and supporting all women.

Of course, feminist or gender lens philanthropy is not just about giving to organisations and project that have the word “women” in their title. All grants have a gender dimension and it’s up to us to understand what they are.

Gender blind is not gender equal and ignoring gender impacts risks entrenching inequality.

Our support for advocacy to amend the Stage Three tax cuts is one example. In their original incarnation, these cuts would have slashed more than $254 billion over 10 years from Government revenue, with the lion’s share of the cuts going to the wealthy. While this may on its face seem like it was a gender-neutral policy, as groups including the Australia Institute and ACOSS pointed out, these cuts would have made our tax system permanently less progressive and disproportionately disadvantaged women.

Our support for the Economic Media Centre’s advocacy helped to shift the narrative on the proposed tax cuts, building awareness among the public of the negative impact of the cuts on inequality and economic fairness. And, as we saw, the Government ended up making substantial changes to Stage Three.

Another example is the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education — or FARE for short. Their deeply held conviction — the Foundation’s too — is that all Australians deserve to live free from alcohol harms, including women and children. In June last year, we funded FARE to help it progress alcohol regulation reforms to reduce men’s violence against women and children, and this work has been incredibly successful in getting alcohol regulation on the national policy agenda.

Last September at National Cabinet, First Ministers agreed to review every state and territory’s liquor laws to prioritise the prevention of violence against women and children. The Prime Minister also acknowledged that tackling the impacts of alcohol on violence is a priority. This is the result of years of work by victim survivors and advocates who have shared their stories and called on leaders to acknowledge and act on alcohol’s role in violence.

We continue to support FARE to cement this win in new state and territory laws, policies and practice that prioritise women’s and children’s health and wellbeing

Over the years we’ve also learned that it’s not just what you fund — it’s how you fund.

We are led by the groups we support. They know better than us about what the issues are and how they need to tackle them. Indeed, one of the key lessons I have learned is that philanthropy is most successful when funders can build meaningful relationships with their grant partners. Relationships that aren’t merely transactional and that are built on strong foundations of trust. That trust can be demonstrated by core or untied grants and multi-year grants that are light on application and reporting requirements. Such an approach has the added benefit of freeing organisations and their leaders up to focus on their work.

It’s crucial that we move away from patriarchal approaches to philanthropy, which have traditionally been rooted in power imbalances and a top-down mentality. To create lasting change, we need to foster an inclusive, collaborative approach that recognises the expertise and voices of the communities we seek to support.

Finally, a word on collaboration. Our work over the years has focused on shaping, growing and sustaining Australia’s philanthropic community. When I started in philanthropy, the philanthropic community was not at all what it is today. No coordinating bodies existed, collaborative giving wasn’t really being done, and philanthropists had no resources and tools to further their own learning.

Early on, I set up workshops and training programs for others in philanthropy, often taking place in a garden or somebody’s living room. And as time went on, our work to build Australia’s philanthropic community also expanded. We played a vital role in supporting the establishment of Philanthropy Australia, the now peak body for the philanthropic sector. We also helped to create Australians Investing in Women, the Australian Environmental Grantmakers Network, Woor-Dungin and Mannifera.

Australian philanthropy would be incalculably weaker without collaboration — and so too our investing. As part of our broader commitment to investing our endowment responsibly, we are starting to explore the gender impacts of our investments. I’m looking forward to expanding this aspect of our work and seeing where it takes us.

Reflecting on where the philanthropic community is today is truly remarkable, and it is the people in this community and the dedicated advocates we support that give me hope for our future.

Together, we’ve come such a long way. There were no gender lens checklists available when I started, but over the years we have seen the importance of:

• funding women leaders and women’s organisations;
• understanding the gender aspects of all our grants;
• embedding trust in our relationships and way of doing things; and
• collaborating for greater impact.

On this last point, my advice to those engaging in philanthropy is to look for fellow travellers — look for other people who have the capacity to fund. Share your philanthropy with other people, learn from what others have experienced and then develop your own agenda about what you’re passionate about. And focus on women, for they often bear the heaviest burdens of injustice, yet within them lies an extraordinary power to dismantle it.