About Girl's Best Friend Foundation

Mission:
To promote and protect the human rights of girls and young women by advancing and sustaining policies and programs that ensure their self-determination, power, and well-being. We support those who challenge the status quo by offering alternatives to the societal messages that girls and young women receive.

Girl's Best Friend Foundation is in the process of closing. We will make no grants after December 2007.  

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Learn how one woman's passion unleashed philanthropy for and by girls, how we do our work, and who we are.  Since 1994, we've grown a lot!

Snapshot, 1995:
GBF is a brand-new foundation, trying out a model of hybrid family and community philanthropy, and a hands-on board of directors. Our style is exuberant, ambitious, unbound by conventions of giving, and risk-taking. 

We're breaking ground in an emerging field -- girls' human rights -- so, our work includes: 

• Expansive grantmaking, small grants, and an exclusive focus on girl-only programming. 
• A goal to support social change work that has community impact as well as changes the lives of groups of girls -- but so far there's little local girls activism.
• Ten percent add-ons to our grants, in recognition that the evaluation we prize takes resources.
• We know girls are expert, and we want to be informed by them. We're thinking about girls' grantmaking, girls on our board, statewide research that includes girls.
• We will commission a review of grantee findings biannually.

Snapshot, 2005:
As a mature grantmaker, we confidently rely on our tested governance and staff model. Our style is more disciplined, still ambitious, and we've drawn from and informed others' giving practices. We are still risk-takers.

We're still compelled to take smart risks to help drive our mission forward. We see and hear about the impact of our money and work, in a field that has grown and become stronger. We are:

• Making more focused, layered, and larger grants. 
• Funding a statewide advocacy campaign, a coalition of groups devoted to girls, an increasing amount of youth community activism, and the research and development for a new youth organizing school with a gender lens.
• Funding a mix of gender conscious programs and organizations.
• Continuing 10 percent evaluation add-ons, and we've developed strong, youth worker-friendly evaluation training and coaching.
• Employing an array of non-financial approaches to build grantee capacity and impact. 
• The home of a young women's grantmaking and social change program. 
• Using research we commissioned to illuminate best practices of girls programs and to suggest how they can be strengthened.
• Beginning a large-scale organizational evaluation.
• Adding training opportunities related to raising money for all grantees.
• Planning GBF's close at the end of 2007.