Women’s Fund Projects 

Economic Security Grants

Economic Security grants play a critical role in ensuring that women and girls have access to a range of programs that will help them navigate these difficult economic times. Our commitment to women’s needs is more important than ever when you consider that 8 percent of all households in Greater Cincinnati are below the poverty line, 28 percent of female-headed households are below the poverty line, and 41% of women-headed households with children are below the poverty line (America Community Survey, U.S. Census Bureau).

Renewal Grants

The Renewal Grants are a unique program designed to assist nonprofit women executives in enhancing their leadership skills and creating strategies to take their organizations to new levels. We purposely invited grant applicants to think beyond traditional boundaries in their proposals—and you will see just how inventive they were. Our first recipient, Jennifer Goodin of the Ronald McDonald House, not only created a new path for her Cincinnati organization—her innovations are being replicated literally across the world. Read her story.

Corporate Toolkit

In 2009 The Women’s Fund released an assessment of the region’s leadership programs in “PULSE: Developing Girls’ and Women’s Leadership Report.” The report included analysis of 48 area leadership programs; included 30 corporate women’s initiatives. A key community recommendation from that report was: Create a best practices toolkit for corporations. Toolkit would include a business case model for the value and benefits of developing female talent; an assessment tool to evaluate effectiveness/direction of current female leadership programs; individual skill assessment and follow up assessment to track results of program; diversity curriculum; and best practices drawn from successful programs in other corporations

A corporate toolkit development team was formed and embarked on a 12-month collaboration led by The Women’s Fund. Participant organizations included Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber; Deloitte; Ernst & Young; Frost Brown Todd; Humana; Huntington Bank; Luxottica; Porter Wright; SOAR; Toyota; UPS. The team was tasked to develop a set of tools to assist large corporations ($100MM+) to move forward in their efforts to recruit, retain and advance women.

Toolkit Components:

Women’s Leadership Development Business Case Tools: available to the community.
Business Case development tool, resources and template.
Dashboard template,

Corporate Mastermind Group: a fee-based program.
A year-long facilitated workgroup that includes a series of guided sessions to move their women’s initiative forward through the implementation of the Corporate Toolkit resources.

Session topics include:
Creating the Business Case
Developing the Task Force
Conducting the Work of the Task Force
Presentation to the Executive Team
Draft Program Design
Revisions and Redesign of Program
Internal and External Rollout and Communications
Sustaining the Program Over Time

For more information on the toolkit, the components available to the community or the Corporate Mastermind Group please contact Vanessa Freytag at freytagv@gcfdn.org or 513-768-6123