Inside the Foundation Blog
News, Updates, Stories, and Impact Across Washington
As we continue moving through this “Year Zero” of our new plan, we are building on decades of collective giving while sharpening our focus on the future: women funding women and girls across Washington State.
Executive Summary: In the first quarter of 2026, Washington Women’s Foundation launched its new business plan and began the important work of putting it into practice. We applied our updated grant criteria to 156 applications and piloted our first place‑based grant in Yakima. We also surfaced key learnings about what it truly means to center women and girls and to pursue systems‑level change. This quarter we continued to […]
A New Chapter for Washington Women’s Foundation For 30 years, Washington Women’s Foundation (WaWF) has believed and acted on a simple but powerful truth: When women come together, we change the world. And we have always been ambitious in living that truth. Historically, we moved to change everything, investing in grantmaking that was intentionally broad and widely focused on addressing racial and gender inequities across Washington state. Today, we are stepping boldly into our next era, […]
Are you looking for a new or deeper way to engage with the Foundation? Consider serving on the Washington Women’s Foundation Board of Directors! We have several openings on the board beginning January 1, 2026, for a three-year term (which may be renewed twice). The director recruitment process is an open call: We welcome all […]
In 2018 the board of Washington Women’s Foundation (WaWF) approved an ambitious Strategic Framework that was meant to guide us through 5 years of planning and transformation. By the time I arrived as your President and CEO in February of 2021, many items on that Strategic Framework had been seen to: We had engaged nonprofits in ongoing dialogue about their needs and sought continuous feedback and evaluation from […]
Thank you to the many members who attended our virtual Annual Meeting this week. I am pleased to announce that the membership elected three new candidates to join our Board of Directors as of January 1, 2021. They are: Julie Burg, a member since 2018 and a senior consultant with Nygren Consulting, a boutique consulting firm […]
Since the first of March, the Foundation’s Board of Directors has had two virtual meetings, a 7-hour video conference “retreat” (in lieu of our annual Board and staff retreat) and a special meeting earlier this week. The primary focus of these meetings has been determining the allocation of funds contributed by our members last year for grantmaking this year. As you may […]
Thank you to the many members who attended our Annual Meeting this week. I am pleased to announce that the membership elected five new candidates to join our Board of Directors as of January 1, 2020. They are: Yvonne Hall, a member since 2001 and a founding partner of the Hall Wealth Management Group of Wells Fargo […]
This week marks the start of the second phase of work for the 2019 Pooled Fund Grant Committee. Proposals from our Top 25 are due this week, and the Grant Committee Work Groups will be reconvening to discuss how these proposals reflect work being done to increase equity and reduce disparities in communities throughout Washington […]