A Celebration of Women in Philanthropy

By Myles Dannhausen Jr. , Door County Living – March 26th, 2020

When you’re cranking out a half dozen stories a week, it’s easy to fall back on reporting crutches for the sake of efficiency. You come to rely on the people you’re most comfortable talking to: official sources from local government offices and boards, the heads of corporations or just the people you know will pick up the phone. Far too often, this leaves you with an overwhelmingly male perspective and not nearly enough voices of those who will be affected by a policy, law or development in their community.

When I moved back to Door County and back to the desk at the Pulse in 2017, I aimed to flag this in my own reporting, to force myself to expand the range of perspectives that our paper portrays in news stories, and to include more women in the conversation. I still don’t do it as well as I would like, but that voice in the back of my head has made a difference in many stories I’ve written since.

In March of 2018, The New York Times began a concerted effort along similar lines to correct an ongoing oversight that had continued for nearly 170 years.

“Since 1851,” its editors wrote, “obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. Now we’re adding the stories of other remarkable people.”

In its Overlooked series, the Times combed history to find women, members of minority groups, and others whose contributions the paper had failed to recognize. Among them were poet Sylvia Plath, writer Charlotte Brontë, civil-rights activist Ida B. Wells and Emily Warren Roebling, who oversaw construction of the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband fell ill.

No, it shouldn’t take a concerted effort to put more women on the page, but in a world in which leadership positions are dominated by men — from municipal and corporate boards, to executive director chairs, to state and national political positions — it follows that the lives and achievements we celebrate most often are those of men.

So in this issue, we celebrate women in philanthropy: the organizations that are focused on women’s issues and the women who are accomplishing extraordinary things and inspiring the next generation. In Door County, it wasn’t hard to come up with dozens of ideas and people to feature — so many, in fact, that we don’t have room to include them all in these pages.

In these pages, however, you will get a glimpse of women who inspire, who have challenged the status quo, who are working every day to solve some of our community’s and our state’s most vexing problems.

We hope their stories inspire you to lend a hand or make a donation, or better yet, to step up as they have to make lives better for our neighbors in Door County.