Mission:

Assisting communities and organizations to achieve broader positive social change through partnering with private sector, academic, and non-profit organizations to identify research and implement solutions critical to human progress.

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Ultimate Goal:

Advance Women to Advance Humanity by Bridging the Mind with the Heart

Intermediate outcomes: Documented short-term, changes, benefits, learning, actions, and effects that result from WFI interventions within target communities and partner organizations. These evidence-based, short-term steps increase the probability of contributing to social change by stimulating changes in users’ knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behavior. WFI enhances that probability with women-based activities across cultures and nations.  

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Evidence:

• Advance Women to Advance Humanity

  • A nation’s Life Satisfaction Level is positively correlated with its Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM)[1]

    • Residents of countries with greater gender equality are, on average, more satisfied with their lives than are residents of societies with less gender equality. 

  • Narrowing the gender gap by empowering women economically can add $12 trillion to the global GDP by 2025[2]

  • Female education is proven to have a multitude of advantages globally

    • GDP rises by 0.3 percent per each 1 percent increase in female education participation

    • Educated women are likely to give back to the community than her male counterparts

    • Children born to literate mothers are 50 percent more likely to survive past age five than children born to illiterate mothers.

• Action-Oriented Research as a Path Forward

  • Research is important to ensure that development programs are appropriate to the needs they aim to address.[3]

  • The gap between research and implementation needs to be bridged by ensuring research is actionable[4]

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Assumptions:

The underlying beliefs about how a project will work, the people involved and the context. These are sometimes implicit in a logic model or theory of change, but it can be useful to state them explicitly.

• The research recommendations produced by graduate students are feasible and implementable by on-the-ground partners in the near and long-term

• The research recommendations produced have direct impact on the communities in question

• The collaborations forged between WFI, universities, and organizations are multiyear to ensure long-term impact for the beneficiaries served

• The arts will impact and shift perspectives and behavior regarding key international affairs issues

• Communities as a whole will benefit as a result of empowering and advancing women

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Program Objectives and Intended Results:

Knowledge and Skills

• Increase theoretical and practical knowledge among students about the issue of study and how it impacts the mission of the partner organization, the wider community, and humanity

• Increase knowledge and capacity among partner organizations to implement innovative, cost-effective solutions benefitting women in their communities

• Attitudes & Behaviors

  •  Inspire a culture of unity, collaboration, and service among the next generation of leaders and changemakers

    • Reorient student research and projects towards service that contributes to the betterment of women and their communities

    • Inspire students to pursue careers in service to the betterment of women and their communities

  • Raise awareness on the role of the arts and humanities as a means of transcending outmoded social, political, and economic systems and structures

    • Include and promote of the arts and humanities within academia, academic spaces and discourse

    • Encourage students to artistically and/or creatively engage an audience beyond the academic

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Activities:

WFI will stimulate activities for projects and organizations that raise the probability of intermediate outcomes.

• Partnership Building

  • Connecting and forging new relationships with university, government, NGO, Artists and private sector partners that share our mission

• Creating Programs

  • Creating and strategizing overarching annual programming

  • Co-creating program proposals with our partner organization to ensure the partner’s, university’s, and our organization’s needs are met

• Curating Global Events

  • End of academic cycle event with the UN featuring presentations of our programs by the research teams and affiliated partner organizations

  • Counsel of Leopards and Arts Counsel events to engage our university and organization partners along with the greater community of stakeholders beyond the direct scope of the program

    • Artist Exhibitions

    • Fireside Chats

    • Podcasts

    • Film Screenings

• Hosting Advisory Committee and Subcommittee Meetings

  • Convening our advisory members to discuss and gain feedback and advice on key programmatic developments

• Documentary Film

  • Creating a documentary film about this turning point in human history inspired by human unity entitled “The Hour”

Program Inputs and Resources necessary to generate activities and program results:

The resources that go into the project that a team or organization needs to be able to carry out its activities.

• Funds

  • To support student/researcher stipends to produce the report

  • To support the on-the-ground partner’s implementation of the recommendations provided by the report

  • To finance the creation of the docuseries and film “The Hour”

• Time

  • WFI staff time

  • Time for program completion (duration)

• Energy

  • Careful strategizing

  • Enthusiasm

  • Love

  • Passion

  • Positivity and optimism

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Outputs:

Products, services or facilities that result from an organization or project’s activities generated in part by WFI programs. These are often expressed quantitatively; for example, number of users, how many sessions they receive and the amount of contact they had with a project.

• Cost-effective, action-driven, and high-quality research with implementable solutions (write ups, reports, articles)

• Bringing together well-suited and mutually beneficial university and organizational partners to make relevant research actionable.

• Podcast, videos, and web resources that help raise awareness of a given issue both within and outside of the impacted communities

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Enablers:

Conditions or factors that need to be present or absent to allow an organization or project’s work to succeed. The presence or absence of enablers can help or hinder a project. There are two kinds of enablers:

• Internal enablers need to exist inside an organization for a theory of change to work and are mostly within an organization or project’s control. Internal enablers describe the mechanisms by which an organization delivers its work (such as the quality of services, relationships and the values and attitudes of staff).

  • Collaborative and teamwork-driven work structure

  • Timely and consistent outreach with partners to maintain strong long-term relationships

  • Strategic selection and expansion of Arts Counsel and Counsel of Leopards network to ensure continued long-term engagement
     

• External enablers need to exist in the external environment for a theory of change to work and are often beyond an organization or project’s immediate control. External enablers describe the context in which an organization works (such as social, cultural, economic and political factors, laws, regulations, and working with other organizations).
   

  • International affairs and arts-focused university programs and on-the-ground partners interested in research-driven interventions

  • Experts, artists, activists, entrepreneurs and practitioners to participate in our global events, fireside chats, documentary, and podcast

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[1] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2019/08/19/new-evidence-shows-gender-equality-builds-life-satisfaction/

[2]

[3] https://us.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-assets/53037_book_item_53037.pdf

[4] https://devpolicy.org/research-in-international-development-bridging-the-gap-between-production-and-use-20191126/