December Founder’s Message

by Pauline Field

Although 2020 has been very hard for many of us, for 50/50 Leadership it has been a year with a silver lining. When everything shut down in March, we stopped, wondering what we could continue to do. Events had to be cancelled, Money 101 workshops could not continue. After a couple of weeks, however, something wonderful started happening: volunteers were flocking to us offering to help in many different ways. Within weeks our ranks grew from 44 to 180!

With all these volunteers we ramped up, created 14 different teams, all with leaders, and got to work.

Our Money 101 program went virtual, providing financial literacy and mentoring for our clients who had grown up in foster care or had been incarcerated, were homeless or survivors of domestic violence. People attended not only from our region of Southern California, but from as far as Canada and England.

Our events re-started online in June with a showing of the movie Suffragette. To celebrate 100 years since passage of the 19th Amendment we had an outstanding Summit with 6 powerful women; the Financial Literacy Awards were in September as was our Get Out To Vote event. Our monthly Roundtables re-started in November and are continuing on the 2nd Saturday of each month.

Volunteers created a completely new website for us! While we have had many kudos for it, we have a team that is working on making it even easier to navigate and find what you are looking for.

The tagline on our logo has changed to reflect our commitment to diversity and inclusion in all we do. It now reads Promoting Equity in Women’s Leadership. We also have changed this newsletter to The Equity Standard.

Looking forward to 2021, we know that many of our volunteers will be back to a schedule that is more restrictive, so our fundraising will be focused on raising sufficient money to hire staff to continue with the momentum we have built.

Thanks for being with us,
Pauline