$75,000 to the Women and Girls Foundation to support the communications and outreach components of the Femisphere campaign: communicating opportunities to low-income moms and communicating the benefits of family friendly work policies to employers and community leaders.

What is a Femisphere? Imagine a world where women are put at the center of development. Where every workforce initiative has a child care center and every school has an engineering program for girls. Where a single parent never has to decide between leaving her sick child home alone or losing her job. Where all women have access to comprehensive healthcare and reproductive services and transportation is no longer an obstacle to economic self-sufficiency. Where paid maternity leave is a reality and fiscal cliffs are not. If you could imagine a world where women, families, and communities thrive, what you would be envisioning is a Femisphere.

What would it look like if Pittsburgh were a Femisphere—where women can access all the resources and services they and their families need to thrive. Seventy-seven percent of households living in poverty in the Pittsburgh area are headed by single mothers with young children. Women of color here earn less than 70 cents on the dollar compared to their white male counterparts. And, while women make up over half of the population, they comprise less than one-fifth of corporate board seats.

The Women and Girls Foundation (WGF) promotes social change by addressing fundamental social inequalities and raising the awareness of these inequities to the media, voters, legislators and corporate and non-profit decision-makers. By serving as an independent and clear voice, the foundation strives to bring together women and men in our region to work together to find solutions to create sustained equity for all of its citizens. WGF empowers donors to invest their dollars strategically and collaboratively to support women and girls’ efforts. They then gather those donations and make strategic investments, through grant awards, made to regional non-profits to support systemic change initiatives, at the state and local levels, focused at developing more equitable public and corporate policies to ensure women and girls in our region can realize their full potential.