Our Focus Is Our Power

Dear Network, 

First, a thank you. WFN peers were a powerful support to our team and me when we took over six years ago—and our feisty founder, Marilynn Gladstone, now in her 90s with a clear mind and sharp tongue, tells the story that without WFN leadership in the late ‘80s, our organization would not exist.  

WFN: Collective Impact in Action.  

Long story, but in 2020, WF Miami was in an existential crisis.   

WFN’s focus gave us power.  

As Tamara Winfrey Harris, President, Women’s Fund of Central Indiana, and I join you as co-conspirators to help refocus the power of WFN’s Executive Leaders Peer Community, we, collectively, have an opportunity to harness our wisdom to better navigate today’s convoluted landscape, wielding our hard-won intuition and the power tools of gender equity, justice, and philanthropy. Major funders should have an opportunity to problem-solve via this selfsame network. In order to do so, I daresay they will need us to provide infrastructure and a GPS.  

Leading women’s funds means we are in this for the long game, while the urgency for gender justice is immediate. I trust that we have the local expertise to redesign systems that could drastically improve outcomes, given the focus and fuel. 

Each of us brings a distinctive design to this mission, yet we can choose to move as an interrelated advocacy and solutions-providing organism: collaborating, communicating, and taking collective action to build major funding pipelines and the systemic designs to invest them in. 

With respect, gratitude, urgency, and looking very much forward, 

Marya Meyer 
The Women’s Fund Miami-Dade
Chief Executive Officer