Maria Cuenca was clear about what she wanted to see in a grant proposal.
“What I was looking for was, How much will it affect girls? … Are girls really involved in it?” she said.
“We were also looking for diversity,” put in Agnieszka Stachurska.
“And if there is any suspicion that the grant proposals are written by an adult, we won’t even go out on a site visit,” said Kristina Reis firmly.
“The proposal has got to be written by girls.”
And Reis and her colleagues can tell if it isn’t. They are just past being girls themselves, teenagers with black lipstick, platform shoes and the remarkable responsibility of giving out $10,000 in grant money to programs serving Chicago-area girls.
Through Sisters Empowering Sisters, part of the Girl’s Best Friend Foundation, they have spent the last year doing everything from research on teen pregnancy programs to analyzing proposed budgets.
“We created the research forms, the research surveys, the requests for proposals–we created almost everything here,” said Cuenca, 18, of the Humboldt Park neighborhood, who will join the other six SES members in announcing the grants on Saturday.
They are part of a growing trend in the worlds of both philanthropy and youth services–one that’s turning teenagers, and even preteens, into philanthropic grantmakers.
In the last three years, four Chicago-area organizations have launched programs in which young people give grants to programs serving young people.
Three are aimed at girls.
The programs are growing in both number and philanthropic visibility. Last year, three girls’ grantmaking groups gave out a total of $14,000. This year, the four groups operating–including the Small Grants Initiative in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood, which includes and benefits girls and boys–plan to give away more than $23,000.
And the Chicago Foundation for Women is planning to launch another girls’ grantmaking program next year.
“This is a way for girls to have control over a world they are building and living in,” said Marie Wilson, president of the Ms. Foundation for Women, which helps fund Girl World, in which girls in the Uptown and Edgewater neighborhoods give out grants.
Nationwide, many of the programs are for boys as well as girls. Across the country, youth grantmaking programs have proliferated in the last five years, said Rob Collier, president of the Council of Michigan Foundations, which has been a pioneer of the concept.
Begun 10 years ago with a challenge grant of $46 million from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the council’s program now has 86 permanently endowed community foundation youth advisory committees across the state.
This year 1,500 Michigan high school students on those committees will award $2.2 million in grants to programs helping their peers.
“At first, there’s a note of incredulity: `You’re giving money to kids to give away?’ ” Collier said. “Even among the kids: `You’re giving us money?’ “
Indeed, it seems remarkable to Amy Cross, 18, a senior at Lincoln Park High School and a member of Sisters Empowering Sisters.
“I don’t think there are many programs that trust girls this much,” she said.
But Collier said teenagers have more than earned that trust.
“These kids are fabulous stewards,” he said. “They do their research. I’ve sat in . . . when they have interviewed applicants . . . and whoa, are they are tough. Adults have said, `This is one of the toughest (interviews) I’ve ever been involved with.’ “
“Girls come up with some really innovative stuff,” said Kristin Anderson, director of external relations for the Donors Forum in Chicago, and a board member of the Chicago Women in Philanthropy, which runs a grantmaking program called Girls and Gold.
Last year, the 15 girls in that program funded an arts camp for girls 7 to 10 years old whose mothers were trying to get off welfare, and one in which high school girls were mentors to younger girls.
“Kids lead incredibly complicated lives. Sometimes I wonder if they’re not better equipped to do (grantmaking) than we are,” Anderson said.
Tiffany Chiang, coordinator of Girl World, marvels at girls’ generous instincts.
“What I find really great about all this is that every year, they want to give money to everyone,” she said. “Adults are not like that.”
But they can’t give money to everyone. And even the youngest grantmakers take their duties in choosing recipients seriously.
“When we go on the site visit, we want to make sure that the girls know what they’re talking about. We want to make sure the girls have something to do with running the program,” said Lorena Nelson, 14, who was 11 when she first became a grantmaker with Girl World.
Even after the grants are made, Nelson still agonizes over her part in the process.
“You worry, `Did I give it to the right person? Did I make the right decision? Are they going to do with it what they said?’ ” she said.
“I thought it was easy; just pick a good program,” said SES’ Cuenca. “But it’s not easy; it’s hard.”
“Strategic grantmaking is to me the single most difficult thing about giving money away,” said Christine Grumm, executive director of the Chicago Foundation for Women, which provides training and some funding for Girl World.
“If the only reason you’re giving money away is to feel good, yeah, you can do that anywhere. But if you’re giving money away to make a difference, you have to be strategic.”
That was the task facing the young women in Sisters Empowering Sisters, who were accepted into the program based on applications and interviews. Every year, the Girl’s Best Friend Foundation recruits a diverse group of young women between 14 and 18 to serve on the grantmaking board.
SES started with 25 requests for grants. The grantmakers visited 17 sites and scrutinized the proposals.
“We make sure the budget is right. We check their math. We say, `Do you really need this?’ ” said Reis, 16, a sophomore at Oak Park-River Forest High School.
They made their final choices in an eight-hour marathon session in which they debated their final choices with a passion born of commitment.
“We were fighting with each other,” said Stachurska, 19, who lives on the Southwest Side and works as an administrative assistant for a research program at Cook County Hospital.
They came to amicable consensus, but the grantmaking wasn’t over. The girls had to present their decisions to the Girl’s Best Friend Foundation board. And the board members had not brought rubber stamps.
“Sometimes the members are against (a program getting a grant),” Cuenca said. “They say, `Why would you want to fund a program like that?’ They come up with really difficult questions for us.”
But the girls answered them. The foundation will give grants this year to the nine groups they chose. Among them is Street-Level Youth Media, which will build a portable video “confessional” in which girls can talk about whatever they want and choose whether they want their faces shown. The booth will be brought to street festivals around the city, and the results will be made into a short film.
“I saw that as just a great idea,” Cuenca said. “I just got caught up with that.”
And Stachurska had been struck by a group of 9- to 11-year-old girls in Rogers Park, Uptown and Edgewater that is getting a grant to host an appreciation dinner for their mothers.
“It was just so amazing to see them so excited about their program,” said Stachurska, who did the site visit. “They said, `Oh, we’re going to have a door prize and play bingo.’ They wanted a chance to bond with their mothers; it’s so hard, between work and school.
“That’s the part that’s exciting” about grantmaking, she added: “You can see it in their eyes.”
Organizers of youth grantmaking programs are no less excited.
“It is kind of a radical concept in philanthropy to have the people benefiting from your grants to have a voice at the table,” said Morenike Cheatom Basurto, girls’ advisory director at the Girl’s Best Friend Foundation.
And it is crucial to educate girls about philanthropy, said Margaret Talburtt, executive director of the Michigan Women’s Foundation, which runs a girls’ grantmaking program in Grand Rapids and the Detroit area.
Baby Boomers are poised to inherit and then pass to their children between $30 trillion and $130 trillion in the next 30 to 50 years, she said.
“Everyone is aware that women live longer than men,” she said. “Many more women will be in a position to make significant gifts than ever in our history.”
The Michigan Women’s Foundation considers it so important to teach girls how to give that it helped create a Girl Scout badge in philanthropy, which is being launched by the state’s Girl Scout councils this Wednesday.
“This is one of the few venues where (girls) get to make some very important decisions and see the results,” Chiang said.
Girls’ programs also help redress an imbalance in the amount of funding going to women and girls, say their supporters. In 1997, according to the Donors Forum, 2.5 percent of grant dollars in Illinois went to programs specifically for women. Two-tenths of 1 percent went to programs for females ages 14 to 19.
Programs targeted specifically to 14- to 19-year-old males got only one-tenth of 1 percent of grant dollars.
But girls are slighted, Anderson said, when it comes to the 14 percent of grant dollars aimed generally at youth. “Much more of that money goes to boys than to girls,” she said.
Nationally, 5.6 percent of grant dollars went to women and girls in 1997, according to the Foundation Center in New York.
Mark Payne, youth grantmaking coordinator for the Small Grants Initiative in Chicago, considers the grantmaking experience important for boys and girls.
“Young people develop their sense of personal power, their sense that they can effectively change communities,” said Payne, whose grantmaking program for 12 boys and 8 girls began in January, with technical assistance from Basurto of Girl’s Best Friend.
But the SES members see grantmaking as most crucial for girls–the ones getting the grants as well as the ones making them.
“It affects their lives,” Cuenca says. “They learn that if they can accomplish this thing, they can accomplish anything.”
The SES members have learned the same. Cuenca, a mother of two, ages 3 and 8 months, has gotten her general equivalency diploma, is in a certified nursing assistant training program and plans to go to college and become a nurse.
“Sometimes people ask me, `What do you do?’ and I say, `I’m a grantmaker,’ ” she said. “It makes me feel proud of myself when people look at me and say, `Wow–you do that?’ “
“I saw all these girls had these dreams,” Stachurska said. “And I thought, `Why can’t I have dreams?’ “
To the young grantmakers, the experience has been a powerful negation of what they see as an unfair public image.
“Everybody sees teenage girls in a very negative light,” Reis said.
“We’ve seen that girls have power,” Cross said. “It’s not only negative things happening to girls, but girls getting involved in these projects to make a change.”
