STEPPING UP
Increasingly, the survival and safety of women around the world are motivating American women to deepen their involvement. The result tends to be more focus, and more active engagement.
Diana von Furstenberg fits that bill. In addition to being chief executive of her global fashion business, the veteran designer is also a mother, the wife of media mogul Barry Diller, a founder of the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation and president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
So it’s the more compelling that within weeks of attending a lunch a few years back to hear about Vital Voices Global Partnership, von Furstenberg decided to join its board. “Vital Voices resonates the most for me because it embraces all the things I believe in and stand for,” von Furstenberg told me. “That’s why I want to be more involved.”
Set up in 1997 by then First Lady Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright after the two attended the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, Vital Voices supports women community leaders worldwide. The group has rallied support from women across the political spectrum, including actress Sally Field, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina and Texas Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchison.
Besides marketing expertise, von Furstenberg has contributed space in her boutiques for performances of Seven, the donated work of seven women playwrights. The collaborative play dramatizes the lives of seven women supported by Vital Voices who are fighting the odds and the cultures in places like Russia, where one exposed domestic abuse; Pakistan, where a young girl who was gang-raped brought her attackers to justice; and Afghanistan, where a midwife defied the Taliban. “I thought if we illuminated their lives this way onstage, it might help to call attention to them,” says playwright Carol Mack, who initiated the project and wrote a portrait of Inez McCormack, a Protestant Irish trade unionist.
Similarly, Jewelle Bickford shifted the significant resources she contributes, notably as board member of Randolph Macon College and the Trisha Brown Dance Company, after a wrenching trip to Rwanda. Bickford, who was a senior advisor at Rothschild Group investment banking firm when she visited Rwanda and currently is a philanthropy consultant at GenSpring, returned to New York and got involved with Women for Women International, which aids women who are victims of war.
“It changes your life,” Bickford said to me. “Nothing has affected me like this. We can no longer tolerate what happens to women in developing countries.”
Bickford has joined the Women for Women board and is shedding her other charitable commitments. “One woman can make a difference,” she says.