The Women's Fund creates opportunity for honesty, open dialogue

The Women’s Fund of The Greater Cincinnati Foundation is committed to uplifting women as they work to reach economic self-sufficiency.  
 
“The majority of households that are in poverty—two thirds-plus of them are single-mother households,” says Vanessa Freytag, The Women’s Fund executive director. “If we don’t do something about that, the other issues we care about in our community, too, like economic recovery, like children’s poverty, things like the Preschool Promise aren’t going to get very far.”
 
An important piece of The Women’s Fund’s work comes as a result of research and education about the issues so many women within our community face. To bring individuals together and attempt to help participants find common ground, The Women’s Fund recently piloted its first eXXchange session in partnership with Beyond Civility.
 
“It technically started last year when we had various activities and events throughout the year, and what we saw was there were a significant group of folks in our area who wanted to take a little more time to go a little more deeply into some issues on the challenge of living in self-sufficiency,” Freytag says.
 
So The Women’s Fund and Beyond Civility hosted a session, devised in a way to allow people with differing viewpoints to hear one another out, then work to create effective dialogue on how to create change.
 
“Some issues tend to get highly charged, and dialogue can shut off where people come from, with definitely some preconceived notions about what an issue is or why it exists,” Freytag says. “When thinking about poverty, I’m not sure the majority of our community thinks of a single mom, and that’s by far the majority of the population that’s reaching for self-sufficiency. So as we resolve this, I think we lift our whole community.” 

Do Good:

• Contact Vanessa Freytag if you're interested in helping The Women's Fund review grants. No experience is required.

• Support The Women's Fund by donating.

• Frequent The Women's Fund website so you can sign up for the next eXXchange session. Proceeds from each session go entirely toward funding mini-grants throughout the year.

By Brittany York

Brittany York is a professor of English composition at the University of Cincinnati and a project manager for Charitable Words. She also edits the For Good section of SoapboxMedia.