Help Powerbitches bring the Feminist Economy to SXSW 2020

by Powerbitches Founder & CEO, Rachel Hills

When I was planning the Powerbitches Feminist Entrepreneurs roundtableearlier this year, I spent many happy hours trawling through venture capital portfolios, coworking databases, and basic-but-fruitful Google searches like “feminist founders” - asking each person I contacted along the way who they thought we should invite to the event.

What I found was hundreds of women who were creating businesses, nonprofits (I classify non-profit leaders as entrepreneurs - they have to secure funding to keep their work afloat too, they just use a different business model), and creative projects that were designed to shift social systems and make the world a better place.

Women who might not easily cross each other’s paths in their day-to-day professional lives, but who had a lot in common when it came to what they were trying to create.

TL;DR? Vote for our SXSW panel proposal here.

It was thrilling, to discover all this amazing work I didn’t previously know about, even as someone who has been working in this field as a writer and connector for 15 years. 

If you came to our roundtable in May, you met some of these creators and innovators there. And you’ll meet more of them at our Salons over the coming months.

But Powerbitches is also looking at ways we can take the conversation we started in New York elsewhere, shining a light on and connecting feminist innovators across the US and around the world.

We’re hoping our first stop will be at SXSW next March. We’ve proposed a panel on Building the Feminist Economy, featuring wisdom from CV Harquail, whose book Feminism: A Key Idea For Business and Society illuminates how feminist thinking can liberate our understanding of work and management, October Salon guest Naj Austin, whose buzzworthy members club Ethels Club opens in NYC this Fall, and Suzanne Siemens, who company LunaPads has been a trailblazer in feminist business practice.

But we need your help to get us there.

Last week SXSW opened voting on their 2020 panel proposals, which they’ll use as a starting point to decide what to include in next year’s festival. 

You can help us with three easy clicks.

1. Click here to view and vote for our panel.

2. Register as a user so you can vote (top righthand corner) - this helps stop people from stacking or automating votes.

3. Go back to our proposal if SXSW don’t send you there automatically, and cast an “up vote” for our panel. Bonus points if you leave a comment.

Click here to vote for our SXSW panel on Building the Feminist Economy.

First look at our Fall/Winter programming

by Powerbitches Founder and CEO, Rachel Hills

I love summer, not just because it's a season of relaxation, but because the slowdown gives me space to do the deep thinking, planning, and dreaming that often falls on the backburner in busier times of the year. 

For Powerbitches, that means setting up our programming and partnerships for our events over the next 6 months, and beginning to vision what we’ll do in the next six months after that.

We’ve got two members only social events in August, but what I’m most excited to share with you are the speakers, conversations, and collaborations we’ve got lined up from September-January. We’ve listened to and reflected on the questions and challenges you’ve raised at our events, and the results are killer.

We’ve got workshops on diversity and operations, and a holiday party around the theme of practicing generosity as a creator or business owner when you’re dealing with limited resources. Our Salon speakers include social media genius Alexis Barad-Cutler, whose Not Safe For Mom Group uses Instagram to spark the kind of stigma-busting conversations about motherhood you don’t normally associate with social media, and Naj Austin, whose buzzworthy Ethels Club has attracted the attention of the New York Times and investment from Roxane Gay. In November, we’re hosting a mega-Salon with three speakers who are tackling the gender pay gap from different angles. And we’re increasing the number of Brains Trusts we host, so you have more opportunities to get feedback on what you’re working on - and learn what other Powerbitches members are working on, too.

Members get first dibs on - and deeply discounted or free tickets to - events, as well as access to our members-only listserv. But the real reason we want you to join is to grow the community of people involved in these incredible conversations.

Learn more about Powerbitches membership here, and see our full event line-up here.

Powerbitches members share their self-promotion secrets

At our June members event, we talked about our desires and discomforts when it comes to self-promotion. Here, four Powerbitches members reflect on a time when promoting our work has worked in our favor.

Be Authentic
Kimmay Caldwell, Hurray Kimmay

As a content marketer, I often get notes from people who are thankful for the authenticity of the way I promote the brands I work with, as well as my own work. People aren’t foolish. They know it's promotion. But when I’m sharing to serve, that's when promotion lands the best, in my experience. One such win was my recent partnership with Thinx. I don't usually partner with brands on a commission base alone, but I was already a longtime user of their products, so I knew I could authentically share them with my audience and if I made a few bucks, great. Because their products and values were so aligned with my own, it naturally unfolded into really easy content and promotion for me. That doesn't mean I didn't have to WORK to create it, it just felt more natural to share. And it worked! It didn't feel icky or weird to share my discount code with people, and I'm proud to say that what I thought may bring in a $50 a month or so brought in a commission check for thousands of dollars last month.

Do The Work
Therese Shechter, Filmmaker

My 2017 Kickstarter campaign for My So-Called Selfish Life required the most intense promotion I've ever done. I spent a year building my list, largely from a survey on childfree experiences which yielded about 2000 voluntarily-given emails. Two months before launch I created a small advisory group, identifying audience segments for the campaign/film. We devised targeted messages, emails, representation in the trailer, and rewards for each group. We also planned special outreach days, special rewards, and special money asks during the campaign.

Once we launched, I worked with a volunteer social media manager to create over 50 funny graphics and organize the timing of the all the posts. I sent regular funny/serious mass emails, sometimes riffing off news, sometimes off things in the film. I hired a publicist for the last two weeks to get us press, and she worked for a discount because she's childfree herself. 

I did (almost) nothing else for four weeks. It was exhausting begging people for money every day while cheerleading the project. I was sure everyone hated me, and we never attracted the influencers we needed to push us to the next level. I was terrified we wouldn’t hit our goal and get the money, and that fear of failing threw me into a depression. But we did it, raising $45,646 in 4 weeks, money that we couldn’t have gotten otherwise. It was a true team effort and I hope to never have to do it again. But if I do, I have my game plan and my therapist's email.

Tap Into Something Bigger Than Yourself
Kristen Sollee, Author

My self-promotion game is usually at its finest when I'm promoting someone else's work. When I produced a sex positive tarot deck conceived and created by my friend Morgan Claire Sirene in 2017, we took the Kickstarter route and knocked it out of the park, receiving over twice as much as we asked for. I think this promotion worked because we invested in a professionally edited video for the campaign, had strong visual content that was reposted far and wide even by those who didn't pledge, and because it centered the experiences of sex workers, so there was a political angle that was noteworthy to those looking to support a new artistic project.

Make It A Team Effort
Rachel Hills, Powerbitches founder, author + producer

As a producer, it’s my job to make sure the projects I’m involved with make budget and reach as many people as possible. That means getting everyone on board with telling the project’s story. But contrary to popular perception, people in the arts often aren’t big on self-promotion - they prefer to focus on making art than on telling people about it. I’m really proud of the promotion campaign we ran for the 2017 off-Broadway production of my book The Sex Myth. We had our entire creative and production team writing blogs, wearing the show’s t-shirt, and doing flash mobs in Washington Square Park. Most importantly, we made it a practice for everyone to share their experience creating the show on social media, not as a push to sell tickets, but just as part of sharing their life. I credit our social media strategy for the fact that we sold out four out of five nights of our show - rare for indie theatre in New York City!

The Powerbitches Interview: Jennifer Wright

Powerbitches’ June salon guest, author and columnist Jennifer Wright, is a force to be reckoned with.

As Harper’s Bazaar's Political Editor-at-Large and a prolific tweeter with an audience of more than 100,000 people, she employs a mix of riotous humor and righteous anger to highlight the injustices of the Trump Administration. She is also a prolific author, publishing four history books (It Ended Badly, Get Well Soon, Killer Fashion, and We Came First, forthcoming October 2019) in just four years.

Quick witted and bubbling over with energy and insight, when we jumped on the phone with Jennifer last week, we bantered about the Democratic primary, the Green New Deal, and the play Hillary and Clinton on Broadway (Jennifer recommends it), before getting down to the nitty gritty of her career as a commentator. 

How did you get started in journalism?

I started when I was in college, in Annapolis in Maryland. I wrote a column for the college newspaper and people really liked it, or at least had strong reactions it to it. It was called Jen Sais Quoi and it was a humorous column about things that were going on in the world. It was very open ended, about whatever I wanted. From that, I learned that I loved writing things and having people react to them, and also that it was something I could make money off. I started writing for the local Annapolis magazine, about everything from the best local dentists to “what defines happiness,” which seems like a really big question to tackle in 800 words.

And how did you get from there from where you are today? 

I moved to New York the day I graduated, and delusionally assumed that with my clips, again, local dentists in Annapolis, I would immediately get hired at Vogue. I showed up in the lobby of Conde Nast and handed them my resume, and basically said, “I’m here for whoever wants me!” Nobody wanted me. But I did start freelancing for people and I got really lucky. I was at a party one night and I sat next to an editor at the Post, who was complaining about having to interview Dominick Dunne in the morning. I started launching into questions - “Are you going to ask him about the time Frank Sinatra paid a waiter to punch him in the face? Are you going to ask him about the rumor that the Kennedy family put a hit on him after Season in Purgatory?” - and by the time I got to the third question, he asked me if I wanted to do the interview instead.

So I interviewed Dominick Dunne. It was an atrocious interview - we talked about the television show Entourage for 45 minutes, then I asked him he thought prostitution should be legalised. Why I asked that is a mystery, even to me. I was very star struck and not prepared. But it was also the last interview he did because he died immediately afterward, so some people presumably thought I must have insight into the literary goings on in New York and I started writing for more places.

Then I got an offer to be the deputy editor for a new site [Gawker founding editor] Elizabeth Spiers was starting, called The Gloss, which is no longer on the internet. I did that, and I got horribly burnt out like every 20 something who tried to run a website, because it’s a very demanding schedule trying to get up 20 pieces every day. I was briefly the editor of the fashion supplement at the New York Observer, then I got my first book deal.

My first book It Ended Badly was published in 2015, and was loosely inspired by a column at The Gloss about fascinating forgotten women in history. People felt that concept was a little too open-ended, so I packaged it as a book about historical breakups, because everyone has had a breakup and can relate to Edith Wharton sending 300 letters to her ex-boyfriend. My there I published my second book about historical diseases, my third book was illustrated mostly because I was getting married and didn’t have the time to do a full one, and now my fourth book, a collection of humorous relationship advice from historical women, is coming out in October.  

I also write a weekly column for Harper’s Bazaar about politics, which started after the 2016 election when everyone realized democracy was not going to be fine. We are living in a fortunate age when a lot of women magazines are hiring a political editor. So it’s been a real joy to get to do that.

What do you see as being the threads that unify your work?

For me it is all about women. I feel like women are incredibly overlooked in most of the history books I read, and bringing their stories to the forefront whenever I can is really important to me. When people tell me sexism doesn’t exist anymore it’s really laughable to me, when our Congress is two thirds male and we’ve never had a female President or VP. I want to focus on women’s stories when writing for Harper’s Bazaar, and in my books, I focus on women’s history.

Did your sense of purpose change at all when Trump got elected?

Yes, absolutely. It’s when I started writing about politics. Up until the 2016 election I was one of those people who would have said I just don’t care that much about politics. I am a Democrat and my family are conservative, so I avoided talking about that with them whenever possible. When Barack Obama was president he was a smart man who I trusted to do a good job, then when the 2016 election came around I remember thinking “I don’t need to worry about this, Hillary has got it in the bag,” then the megalomaniacal narcissist come to power and made me question everything I thought I knew about this country. It made me examine the ways women were historically discriminated against in politics, and once you pull that curtain back you can never not unsee it. I hope in the future we again have a President, Congress, and Supreme Court that I think is smart and noble, but I don’t think there will ever be a time where I’m not reading, thinking and worried about it again .

Jennifer with New York Times investigative journalist Sarah Maslin Nir at the launch of her first book, It Ended Badly.

One of the things that has always impressed me about you is your incredible work ethic: four books in four years, plus your column, and a huge presence on Twitter. How do you get it all done?

I treat it like a job. I know there are some writers who only write when the muse moves them, some of whom produce much more beautiful books than I ever will. But I go to the gym in the ,orning, then sit down and write until 6pm at night. Kind of like every other job does. I make sure I write at least 500 words a day. Before I got married it was 1000, but I live with a person now and I like spending time with him. Some days it comes really easily and I knock off early and I got to the movies, some days it takes the entire day. It also helps to have an idea of what specifically I want to write on a specific day.

You have more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. What’s that like?

I literally never look at my Twitter by myself anymore because there were too many death threats. It’s only on my husband’s phone now. He has the login, and if I want to say something, I send it to him and he posts it for me. There were too many days when he would come home and I would say “This person wrote ‘I’m going to murder you bitch,’ and I looked them up on Google and I don’t think they’re serious but…”

Once you pass 50K followers you need to come up with a plan to stay away from it because otherwise you can be on Twitter the entire day. You never don’t have notifications. People are always talking to you, even if most of the things they’re saying things that are nice and smart and funny. I do think the smartest thing you can do at that point is give access to someone else and let them go through and block things for you. When you’re reading someone saying crazy stuff about your best friend, those people sound crazy, but if it’s just you alone looking at the screen at 2am, it’s really bad.

Twitter can be a lot. But it’s also funny stories about how a llama has escaped and is on the highway, it’s how I’ve gotten some of my jobs, and it’s also indirectly how I met my husband.

Jennifer Wright will be in conversation with Powerbitches founder Rachel Hills at our next Salon event, on June 25. Click here for more information and to secure your tickets.

The Real Trouble with Self-Promotion

by Powerbitches Founder & CEO, Rachel Hills

It’s not just about confidence. It’s about commodification.

I got my first post-college job in part because I was good at self-promotion.

By that, I don’t mean that I was an Instagram star (it was 2007 - I wouldn’t even start a public blog until later than year), or that I kept myself in the editorial team’s line of view (although, in retrospect, I guess I did). I mean that literally, when they were talking about who to hire, one of the people in the room apparently said “Rachel is good at promoting things that she is involved with.” Ergo, if they hired me, I would be good at promoting them, too.

And it was true: in the previous three years, I had managed to position the politics vertical of the volunteer-run youth website I co-edited as the (well, a) key place talented young people should be writing for if they wanted to make it in the media. I convinced people much older and more successful than I was to support my projects, and negotiated the people I was working with into spaces we didn’t technically belong in. I punched above my weight.

So it is strange, then, that I find myself so distinctly uncomfortable with the demands of self-promotion as they manifest themselves here in 2019. And I know I’m not the only one.

“We live in an era that asks us not just to sell our work, but to sell ourselves as symbols of aspiration and success.”

The standard response to this conundrum is that women don’t self-promote because we worry that talking about our successes without apology makes us less likeable. It’s imposter syndrome. It’s the confidence gap. And there’s truth in all those things. I considered deleting that paragraph above talking about my early 20-something accomplishments because I didn’t want to look braggy. And check out my small, apologetic self-deprecation up there in parentheses.

But I also think there's more to it than that. It’s that we live in an era that asks us not just to sell our work, but to sell ourselves as symbols of aspiration and success. That demands that we position ourselves as brands, when often, being a brand isn’t compatible with being a human being.

Brands are consistent. They are aspirational. They reveal only the parts of the story that make you want to purchase a product. Sometimes they even conjure a story that has little do with the facts of the product being sold at all.

Human beings, on the other hand, are messy and multifaceted. Sometimes we feel powerful and firing on all cylinders, and other times we’re sad and wracked with self-doubt. We might be hard working, hyper efficient event, but we’re not automatons. People can be inspired by us and what we create, but that doesn't mean we're perfect.

As Powerbitches member and feminist marketing consultant Kelly Diels observes, there are parallels between the ways we are exhorted to position ourselves professionally, and the ways womxn are told to present ourselves in everyday life more generally. Diels writes:

“In a culture that requires women to present with mandatory femininity, to behave in particular ways, and to perform certain behaviors in order to get access to rights and resources, every woman in our culture has to present herself as saleable, consumable object.

We have to manage impressions; we have to manage a perceptions; and we have to exhibit a certain set of qualities and have a story associated with us in order to get the things that we want – because those resources are associated with that story.”

And broadcasting that story - and maintaining its consistency -  is labor: both in terms of the sheer amount of output required to remain visible in an attention economy that "24-hour" doesn't seem to do full justice to, and on the level of our souls, as we flatten our complexities in order to become more desirable consumable objects. It’s understandable - and entirely rational - that we might flinch at or resist those demands.

“Often, being a brand isn’t compatible with being a human being.”

At the same time, as creators - be it of art, or businesses, or social change - sharing our stories with the world is part of how we build alliances, change culture, and make impact. The question is how to balance the need to present our work to the world with courage and confidence, without replicating toxic marketing dynamics, or burying ourselves in own hype.

This week another Powerbitches member, Kate Gardiner, co-published a report on The Self-Promotion Gap, which suggests that part of the solution is to reframe talking about our accomplishments as a service to others. Ie, you're not bragging - you're inspiring by showing others the possibilities that are available to them, too. 

For me, I’ve found the answer is to focus on the work. When I talking about what I’m creating and why it matters, I feel lit up, charismatic, a force to be reckoned with. In championing the things I care about, I become a more authentic - and effective - champion for myself. Which is probably how I got that post-college job offer back in 2007.

Join us for a conversation about authentic self-promotion in Astoria on Tuesday June 11 - there are two spots open for virtual members as well.

6 Thoughts on Feminist Business

By Powerbitches founder & CEO, Rachel Hills

Last Monday night, Powerbitches brought together 40 NYC-based feminist business owners, nonprofit leaders, and artists to talk about how they were using their work to help bring about a more gender-equitable world.

It was our biggest event yet, and my co-facilitator Lex Schroeder of Feminists At Work and I were blown away by the power, enthusiasm, and collective intelligence in the room.

I'm still processing the conversation and where we want to take it next, but wanted to share with you six takeaways from our discussion.

1. Terms like “feminist entrepreneurship,” “entrepreneurial feminism,” and “feminist business” might be new to the NYC business scene, but there are A LOT of people doing work that falls under that banner. We identified more than 140 people in NYC creating feminist-informed businesses, products, and organizations in the field mapping we did to curate this event, and we’re sure there are many more we didn’t uncover. There is also an existing community of people in the US and internationally working on defining what a feminist business is, like the team behind the Entrepreneurial Feminist Forum in Toronto, which inspired our event, and Jennifer Armbrust of Sister.is.

2. Our community - and the values that drive it - is different to the women’s leadership or women in business communities. Yes, we want women in positions of power, and we’re excited by women-led businesses. But most of all, we’re excited by people (of all genders) who are using their businesses to drive feminist social, cultural, and political change, and who are using their power as leaders to shift the way that businesses and organizations work. 

3. Intersectionality matters. If you’re creating a product or service that is designed to improve the lives of “women,” are you taking into account the needs brown women? Trans women? Disabled women? Working class women? Are their voices being heard? Who holds positions of leadership in your organization? As one attendee put it, we need to make sure diversity is “the first lens we look through, rather than last.” And while most of the people in room on Monday identified as women, feminist entrepreneurs can also be nonbinary people, trans men - or cis men who are creating projects that transform gender roles and expectations for other men.  

4. We are broad tent, but one that is driven by a sense of shared purpose and values. Some of our participants on Monday night ran for-profit enterprises. Others ran nonprofits. Some were solopreneurs. Others managed large teams. Some believed that feminism and capitalism were inherently incompatible. Others wanted to make bank. We came from industries as varied as tech, fashion, media, politics, events, and consulting, and tackled issues ranging from wage equality, to reproductive rights, to sexual health, to violence against women. But what united us was a desire to use our work for a social purpose, and the responsibility to fund the things we’re creating: whether through philanthropy, VC investment, crowdfunding, or something else.

5. Some of us are trying to remake capitalism, and that’s a tall order when you’re a start-up or solopreneur. We’re working to build businesses and organizations that pay employees fairly, that have diverse and equitable leadership structures, that operate with radical generosity, and that economically value women’s work - and we’re looking to do that within businesses and organizations that are often underfunded and don’t adequately value our own work. (Which is one reason Powerbitches is working on an event on focused on funding and investment for the second half of 2019.)

6. So let’s be compassionate to ourselves. In an effort to create a better world, feminists can fall into the trap of turning our ideals into a series of impossible standards that we flagellate ourselves and others for not living up to. As the feminist business movement grows in New York City and elsewhere, it’s essential that we combine our call to do better with compassion for ourselves and others - as Ngoc Loan Tran of Black Girl Dangerous puts it, calling each other in instead of out.

Want to learn more about feminist entrepreneurship and the people leading this conversation? My Monday night co-facilitator Lex Schroeder has created a fantastic resource list of books, tools, and websites to help deepen your knowledge. Click here to download it.

Feminist Entrepreneurs Unite: in pictures

On Monday May 13, Powerbitches brought together 40 feminist entrepreneurs, innovators, and changemakers to talk about how they bring their values to their work. Here’s a glimpse at some of the players and faces in the room. Photos by Micah Bochart.

Powerbitches connect before the event. From left: Betsy Nilan of Get In Touch Foundation, Tamara Hamden of Partera, criminal justice researcher Jennifer Peirce, Powerbitches founder Rachel Hills.

Powerbitches founder & CEO Rachel Hills starts the conversation.

Cynthia Medina Carson of WAGER and Amy Shack Egan of Modern Rebel share how they incorporate their feminist values into their businesses.

Lex Schroeder of Feminists At Work and the Entrepreneurial Feminist Forum fills us in on the entrepreneurial feminist landscape.

Publicist Chelsea Leibow, Alissa Medina of Fembot, Estrella Jaramillo of B-Wom.

Cristina Cala of the Why Women Project.

Small group conversations: Therese Shechter of Trixie Films, non-profit management consultant Marisa Falcon, Maya Brooks of iFundWomen, Chelsea Leibow.

Small group conversations: Alexis Barad-Cutler of Not Safe For Mom Group, Kait Scalisi of Passion By Kait, creative consultant Holly Stevenson.

Small group conversations: Rachel Piazza of Feminist Self-Defense, Chana Ewing of GeenieBox, Symone New of The Doula Project, Tina Aswani Omprakash of Own Your Crohns.

Small group conversations: Mendy Marsh of Voice Amplified, Amy Shack Egan, Celine DeCarlo of Mara Hoffman, Erin Mazursky of Rhize.

Our big, beautifully full room.

Committing to bring our values to our businesses in new ways.

After event networking: Holly Stevenson.

After event networking: Mendy Marsh, Michelle Wonsley Ford of LondonPlane Advisory, Erin Mazursky.

Powerbitches commitments.

“I’m bringing feminism into my business by…”

The Powerbitches Interview: Sharlene Kemler

Powerbitches May salon guest, Sharlene Kemler

Our May Salon guest Sharlene Kemler is on a mission to make philanthropy more effective and inclusive.

Through her consultancy SK Philanthropy, Sharlene works with pro-athletes, entertainers, and high net worth individuals to direct their money where it will make the most impact. Now she is working on her most ambitious project yet: Modern Philanthropy Collective, a minority-led social impact fund that is changing the face of philanthropy and creating a new philanthropic system in which generational wealth and sustainable impact can be obtained within minority communities.

We sat down with Sharlene to talk about power, purpose, and how she believes philanthropy needs to change.

PB: What drives your work?

SK: What it really comes down to is my passion for social sustainability. I want the people running non-profits to be able to do the work they’re passionate about, which is program development, instead of spending their time jumping through hoops to get funding.  SK Philanthropy and Modern Philanthropy Collective are disrupting the way philanthropy is being done by prioritizing inclusion in every aspect of our model. We believe that in order to achieve sustainable impact we need to close the racial equity gap impacting communities of color nationwide.  

PB: How does that sense of purpose play out in each of your projects?

“SK Philanthropy and Modern Philanthropy Collective prioritize inclusion in every aspect of our model.”

SK: With SK Philanthropy, I work with entertainers and athletes to match them with a nonprofit that fits their interests, image, and desired impact. Often when people with high profiles and lots of financial resources want to do good, they think the logical next step is to start their own nonprofit, but partnering with an existing nonprofit is often a far more impactful and efficient use of their money. We highlight the impact they could have giving $150K over five years, as opposed to spending $150K just to launch a nonprofit, before you even get anything done.

Modern Philanthropy Collective is designed to close the equity gap for minorities. There are over 1.5 million nonprofits in the US, and less than 11 percent are led by a person of color. Most grant managers at foundations and heads of giving in private industry are older white men, who give to the same organizations over and over again. There is a real mismatch between the communities receiving the services and the people funding them. Modern Philanthropy Collective addresses that mismatch by bringing together donors to fund projects and organizations led by people of color. We also have a really innovative financing model that’s part traditional philanthropy and part social impact fund.

PB: How did you get into doing this kind of work?

SK: I started my career in cause marketing, working first with Ben & Jerry’s on their global warming tour, and later with Lifebeat on HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness. In both of those roles, I saw first hand the impact celebrities can have when it comes to mobilizing people and passing legislation. If I talk to young people about condoms or how I lost my virginity, it’s like being lectured by your mom. If Snoop Dogg does it, people pay attention. The reach celebrities have is a gift that not everybody gets. So why not use it for good?

Part of my job at Lifebeat was to connect performers with local community groups who could set up stalls at concerts when they were on tour and educate their audiences about the rise of HIV/AIDS amongst youth in America. Some of the managers would come back to me the following year and say, “We love what you did, but we’re working on a different cause now - are there any organizations you can connect us with?” So I’d use my contacts to connect them with new organizations. I’d been wanting to branch out on my own for a while, and my husband pointed out that this work I was doing for free was the beginnings of a business. And that’s how SK Philanthropy was born.

PB: One of the reasons we started Powerbitches is to give entrepreneurs a community to talk about the challenges involved in doing big, ambitious work, often without much of a support structure around you. What have challenges have you faced running SK Philanthropy?

SK: I don’t always take everyone who wants to work with me. And that’s kind of hard, because a lot of celebrities are surrounded by yes people, and it throws them off when I tell them no. At the end of the day, I’m always going to be extra protective of the nonprofits I work with. If something goes wrong, the celebrity will always have their money, but the nonprofit will face backlash that could impact their funding for years to come. So some people who come to me, I have to tell them no. If you’re really passionate, you can donate anonymously, but I’m not going to let you use this nonprofit to help your PR.

“If I talk to young people about condoms, it’s like being lectured by your mom. If Snoop Dogg does it, people pay attention.”

PB: All of your work is grounded in the idea that we need to rethink the way philanthropy operates. How does philanthropy need to change?

SK: The model we have right now is a very old-school model. 501c3s and 501c4s are really restricted in what they’re able to do, in ways that make it really hard to create sustainable impact. For instance, if you’re a 501c3 you’re not allowed to lobby. But one of the main ways groups get policies passed in Congress is because they’re able to hire a really kickass lobbyist. Do you mean to get me a 501c3 on gun violence can’t have someone working for them on the Hill? Most donations from large private institutes have restrictions. Donors need to stop micromanaging their donations and believe in the organization and its efforts. Creating restrictions on funds forces nonprofits to move away from their original mission. The philanthropic sector needs to address the racial equity gap plaguing communities by diversifying their funding model.

PB: How do you hope Modern Philanthropy Collective will change that?

SK: That we’re minority-led matters. It’s important for the communities being served to see people who reflect them both in the organizations doing service provision and advocacy, and in the people doing funding. You understand the issues a bit better, whether it’s maternal death rates for women of color or inequality in education for children of color, because you’ve lived with them yourself. I’m done with the white savior complex. Research has shown that having a fund that mirrors the population it serves is critical for sustainable development. That’s what I’m trying to do with the Collective.

In addition to being minority-led, one of the most important things we’re doing is creating a model that will free both Modern Philanthropy Collective and the organizations we work with from constantly having to chase funding. Instead of just giving a gift and walking away, all of our capital will be split evenly between two initiatives: a more straightforward, traditional grant, and our mission-related investment portfolio. By putting part of our money into VC companies and hedge funds that are minority led and run, in the medium term we’ll be able to use our profits to fund our grant work instead of relying on foundations and corporate funders. It’s a powerful model, and I’m excited to put it into action!

Sharlene Kemler will be in conversation with Powerbitches founder Rachel Hills at our next Salon event, on May 30. Click here for more information and to secure your tickets.

Editor's Letter: Work Isn't Everything

By Powerbitches founder & CEO, Rachel Hills

Today’s blog post feel dangerously off-brand. As we say on our homepage (and everywhere else), “we believe that work matters,” after all.

But I’ve been thinking about an article I read in last weekend’s New York Times, about how increasingly long hours in professions like finance, law, and consulting have impacted women’s ability to advance at work. 

The crux of the article is that as more women have earned degrees, the demands of the jobs that require those degrees have grown, stretching from 40 to 60 hours a week or more. The result is that, intentionally or not, when high-earning professional couples have kids one person will take the 60-hour a week, multi-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year job, and the other will take a 20-, 30- or 40-hour a week, moderately paying job. 

Because it’s close to impossible for one person to work more than 60 or 80 hours a week and maintain a life outside of work, let alone two. And in heterosexual couples, surprise surprise, this often ends up arranging itself as the man working the 60-hour a week job and the woman working the more reasonable job that allows her to hold the front at home.

I found the article fascinating: not just from a “women’s” perspective, but from an all people perspective.

There are some jobs that require you to work around the clock. Running a country. Working on a campaign to help someone get elected to run a country. Putting the final touches on your book or film before you send it out into the world. Launching a start-up. (Although maybe we even need to rethink that last one. I run two businesses, and while I’m sure I’d get more done if I dedicated 80 hours a week to the task, I’m also pretty fucking productive with 30. More productive than I was when I worked 50 hours a week, even.)

But there is something wrong with a work culture that demands this kind of total dedication as a default. It doesn’t just make it difficult to raise a family. It makes it difficult to have friends, or maintain relationships of any kind. It makes it difficult to look after your health, to make time to go to the post office, or do anything in life outside of work that brings you joy.

It’s not a stretch to link this conversation to our upcoming Feminist Entrepreneurs roundtable on May 13, which is not just about connecting people bringing to life powerful products, ideas, and organizations that make the world a more gender-equitable place, but about incorporating feminist ideas and values into the way we run those businesses and organizations. Designing jobs so that the people we work with can have lives outside of work - and paying them accordingly - is an integral part of that.

And for those of us who are deeply in love with our work, it’s worth reflecting on how these trends play out in our own lives.

There will be seasons when whatever we’re working to bring in the world demands our total focus and dedication. But are we allowing that to become all the time? And when we do, what is the cost?

Feminist Entrepreneurs Unite!

A circle of people of different ethnicities and genders joining hands in the center.

By Powerbitches founder & CEO, Rachel Hills

When I first learned about the concept of feminist entrepreneurship in the fall of 2017, I felt electrified, both as a journalist and a small business owner.

My friend and colleague Lex Schroeder was co-producing an event in Toronto called the Entrepreneurial Feminist Forum, a coming together of business owners, theorists, social enterprise folks, and funders of all genders to talk about how to use business to create a more equitable world.

My inner journalist was excited by the potential to deepen the public conversation about women and entrepreneurship. In the previous few years, “entrepreneur” had become a kind of proxy for “empowered woman,” through cultural phenomena like Lean In and #GirlBoss, a trend I had covered for The Daily Beast in 2014.  As a long time freelancer, I understood well the sense of exhilaration and autonomy that could come from charting your own course. All the same, the notion that “woman in charge” = “feminist” ipso facto felt hollow to me.

“Feminist entrepreneurship felt like a call to do better …to incorporate our feminist principles into our businesses, nonprofits, and other projects.”

From a business perspective, I had spent most of 2017 working on an off-Broadway play based on my 2015 book The Sex Myth, with a view to creating infrastructure to spread the project as an activist and social change tool. It was a project that involved raising money, developing and pricing products, and managing (and paying) a team of 14 people… all while being heavily pregnant and later caring for a newborn baby. The idea of creating feminist products and services that could be sustained by commerce rather than philanthropy or unpaid volunteers was - and still is - deeply interesting to me.

But feminist entrepreneurship - or entrepreneurial feminism, a term coined by Canadian professor Barbara Orser - asked for something more than what I’d already been thinking about. It wasn’t just about what we were creating. It was about how we were creating it.

Feminist entrepreneurship felt like a call to do better: both in the sense of having a more substantive public conversation about what it meant to run a feminist business, and in the challenge it presented to all of us to incorporate our feminist principles into our businesses, nonprofits, and other projects.

All of this is to say that I’m thrilled to be hosting a Powerbitches roundtable on Feminist Entrepreneurship in New York alongside Lex at Luminary on May 13.

We will be bringing together a curated group of 20-30 diverse founders and other feminist leaders to learn more about what feminist business practice looks like, the different ways it’s being applied in business in New York and elsewhere, and to learn from and connect with people who share our values. All participants will be given the chance to shape the discussion, and share their ideas, questions, challenges, and success stories. This interactive discussion will be the heart of the event.

Is this event for you?

For the purposes of this event, we’re looking at the category of “entrepreneur” fairly broadly. Some of the people we’re inviting to the event have venture capital backing, others are running nonprofits or solopreneuring their own startups. Others still are feminist artists or journalists

“We will be bringing together a curated group of 20-30 diverse founders … to learn from and connect with people who share our values.”

We’re looking for a diversity in the way feminism is incorporated into participants’ businesses as well.

You don’t necessarily need to be creating a product or service that is explicitly designed to improve gender equality to qualify as a feminist entrepreneur. Instead, you might exercise your feminist principles in your business practice: from who you hire, to how you market, to the way you design your work.

Nor does feminist entrepreneurship have to be “crunchy.” The decision by Rent The Runway and The Wing - two very “shiny” (and very profitable) New York companies - to give their hourly workers medical benefits, parental leave, and stock options last year is an example of feminist entrepreneurship in action.

Want to be part of the conversation? Apply to join us here.

Ultimately, when it comes to this subject, I’m still learning. And my sense is that the experts are, too. The standard way of operating a business is so unequal, so unfeminist, that the question of how to do it better - and the best way to do it better - is very much up for debate. It requires all of our creativity. All of our innovation. And all of our collaboration and collective brain power.

If you’re interested in learning more about feminist entrepreneurship, I’ve included a short list of resources for your information below:

Feminine Capital by Barbara Orser (book)
Liisbeth
Feminists At Work
Sister Is
Design anthropologist Dori Tunstall on decolonizing design
Indigenomics Institute
The Oxford Handbook for Diversity in Organizations
How to Start a Feminist Restaurant (zine)
Eve-volution
CV Harquail

The Powerbitches roundtable on feminist entrepreneurship will be hosted at Luminary NYC on Monday May 13. Click here to learn more or to apply to join us.