Greeting One Skyers!

At One Sky our aim is to fulfill our mission of supporting exceptional organizations that empower women and girls to hold up half the sky, while also engaging and informing our members on the issues. We have quite a few events this season, but if your dance card is filling up fear not! You can engage with One Sky in a myriad of ways: Watching the videos in your jammies, listening to the audio in your car, or reading the notes– yes, we are going multimedia! And if you are too busy for any of that (as many of us are) you can relax and feel confident knowing that come October you will be supporting the well-researched organizations presented for your vote on our annual slate.

Announcements

• Video, audio, and notes of Erin Ganju event
• Our next events are coming right up — next Tuesday 1/29 and Wednesday 1/30
• Today (!) learn about a cool volunteer opportunity for International Women’s Day
• Can you host on February 25th?
• Congratulations Jenny Lee

For your learning pleasure…
We kicked off our season hearing from Erin Ganju, co-founder of Room to Read who shared with us her considerable experience on both the operating side and now the philanthropic side of international educational change. We have for you a video recording, a “podcast” of the audio and also the highlights in notes taken by Lisa Acree. Thank you Lisa Acree and Mark Selcow for hosting and for the lovely repast. (Password on our site is “osgc”)

Our next super cool events are next week!
RSVP Here
Please join us at the home of Stephanie Shmunes to learn all about the very local landscape for girls education. Emma Mayerson Founding Executive Director of Alliance for Girls will be sharing with us their hot off the press qualitative and quantitative research on the lived experiences of girls in San Francisco, including recommendations for how to improve our local school and community systems to better meet girls’ needs.
Prospective members are welcome and may attend one event before deciding to join One Sky. Please send your prospective members this Evite so that they may RSVP. Junior members (aka your kids) are also welcome at this event. Likewise, please make sure they are included in the RSVPs.

(And if you can’t make this SF event, you can catch Emma the next night, 1/30 at our first ever Peninsula event: RSVP here)

Today (!) learn about a cool volunteer opportunity with WAKE
One Sky member, Trish Tierney’s organization, WAKE, is convening social justice and women’s rights leaders from across the United States, here in San Francisco from March 6-8, 2019. They are looking for volunteers willing to donate time, talent and resources to support these inspiring groups. They are putting together teams of volunteers (open to all people – not just women) for a meaningful and fun way to spend International Women’s Day (March 8, 2019). If you are interested, join their

online info session today, Thursday, January 24th @ 12pm PST. You can register here to learn more. And, here is a PDF with more details and the timeline. You can also contact them here to find out more.

Looking for hostess for Feb 25th event

Due to a scheduling snafu, we are looking for a hostess for our Feb 25th event with previous grantees the Respect Institute and Iqra Fund. If you would like to host this lovely event, please let us know at info@oneskygivingcircle.org, or just reply to me 🙂

Congratulations Jenny Lee

One Sky Member Jenny Lee is taking it up a notch, having just moved to a new job in women’s global health. She will be working at the Women’s Global Health Imperative (RTI) – running clinical trials on HIV, family planning and more. Jenny is also a member of the Rise Up Leadership Council (a connection made via One Sky) and if you are interested in learning more about that or joining the council, please contact her at jennyelee@gmail.com.

That’s it for now.

Yours in being the change,

Maryam Mohit

President, One Sky Giving Circle

Dear One Sky Giving Circle,

I am writing to invite you to an insider briefing on Monday (Dec 10) at 9am. I hope that you can share this with your members as an easy way to stay connected with what the Center plans to do in the coming months and year with a conservative Supreme Court and in the states.

To complement the call, here is an excellent Op-Ed authored by the Center for Reproductive Rights’ very own, Julie Rikelman. Julie is the Senior Director of Litigation of the Center’s U.S. Programs. She first worked with us from 1999-2001 as a Blackmun Fellow and returned to the organization in 2011 as a Senior Staff Attorney. Most recently, Julie was one of our lead attorneys working on invasive ultrasound laws, helping to build an innovative legal strategy that exposes the way in which these laws violate the 1st Amendment rights of both patients and their doctors.

Register here for the Insiders’ Donor Briefing taking place on Monday, December 10th from 9-10am PST.

Elizabeth

PS We will be recording the call if you can’t attend.

Our grantees and members are in the news, making waves and generally being super cool. Here for your enjoyment…

• VoteRunLead – Invitation to Live National post-election Town Hall
• RiseUp – Invitation to Leadership BreakfastJulie Caskey running for Piedmont School
• BoardWAKE – One Sky Member Trish Tierney’s org. in Peru
• Afghan Institute for Learning in the news

VoteRunLead Invitation to Live National Town Hall: November 12, our 2018 Grantee
VoteRunLead will host a National “Women & Power” Town Hall on Facebook Live to analyze election results. VoteRunLead is proud to celebrate the accomplishments of their 177 alumnae who ran for office this year, of whom 79% advanced to the general election. Many of whom will be in attendance to share their stories. RSVP here to join this conversation!

RiseUp Invitation to Leadership Breakfast:
One Sky Member, Jenny Lee, recently joined the Leadership Council at One Sky Grantee Rise Up as a way to share her passion for advancing gender equality, within a fun, learning community. She had been looking for a way to contribute her time and energy to improving women’s and children’s health, education, and equity for a long time, and when she learned about Rise Up and their achievements a couple years ago at One Sky, she knew it was an organization she would be honored to work with.

She and Denise Dunning invite you to the annual Rise Up Breakfast on December 5, 2018. You’ll get a chance to hear more about the inspiring work that Rise Up is doing for women and young people around the world. One speaker, Yeabsira Bogale, was recently featured on The Today Show with Michelle Obama! If you’re interested, feel free to email Jenny for more information or learn more about the breakfast and Rise Up at riseuptogether.org/breakfast.

Also, please Jenny know if you’re interested in becoming part of the Leadership Council. She’s happy to share her motivation for joining and her personal experiences.

Julie Caskey running for Piedmont School Board: I know we don’t have many members in Piedmont, but still! How cool is it that long time One Sky member and grant screener Julie Caskey is running for school board. She is certainly walking the walk and putting herself out there to be the change. Find out more about her campaign here, and tell your friends in Piedmont that she rocks!

One Sky Member Trish Tierney’s WAKE kicks off Tech2Empower in Peru:
WAKE’s mission is to amplify the work of gender and social justice activists and their organizations. They do this by connecting them to new networks, tools, training, and resources.
The WAKE Team has just arrived in Cusco, Peru to prepare for a week of in-depth work with women “empresarias” (or entrepreneurs) and activities designed to support girls’ education. From organic energy bars to artisan jewelers and even a Llama trekking company, small businesses in Cusco will benefit from the collective knowledge and work of WAKE’s 20 Tech2Empower Advisors, and high school girls will have intimate career mentoring sessions with our team (and try virtual reality goggles for the first time!).

In addition to working on specific projects designed to strengthen and scale these businesses, WAKE will meet with and encourage girls from local schools to explore tech careers – there will be over 100 girls from secondary schools that will have the chance to learn about what careers in tech look like, ask questions, and connect with WAKE’s group. They will also get to know other social impact businesses through the first ever women-focused tech networking event in Cusco, as well as a tech fair!

To stay up to date on WAKE’s progress you can follow them on Facebook, Twitter, + Instagram to stay up to date and hear more.

Afghan Institute of Learning in the News: Our 2012 grantee, Dr. Sakeena Yacoobi who, as leader of the Afghan Institute of Learning, set up 80 secret schools for 3,000 girls in Afghanistan, was recognized for her outstanding work at the TRT World Citizen Awards in Istanbul on October 5, 2018. We were honored to have her meet with us in 2013 where she shared with One Sky her tireless work on behalf of Afghani women and girls.

In accepting her award, Dr. Yacoobi said, “I was happy to be invited here because the world doesn’t know what is going on with the children who are in war zones, who are in refugee camps, who lost their parents, who lost their homes, who don’t have the environment to quietly sit and read and write or draw a picture … who every time they hear a sound think a bomb is exploding, to work with these traumatized children is joyful. When you look in their faces, when they smile and then they play, it is another world.”

Dr. Yacoobi started working in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan in the early 1990s, training teachers, opening schools for children and learning centers for women. In 1995, she established the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), which now serves 350,000 people each year – 70% of them girls and women.

That’s it for now! So exciting to see so many One Sky Grantees and members doing such cool stuff that forwards the One Sky mission!

Maryam Mohit
One Sky Giving Circle

Greetings One Skyers!

We are gearing up for another inspiring, informative and impactful One Sky Season. Our funding focus for the 2018-19 cycle will be Girls Education! Please read below for:

1. 2017-18 Grant winners
2. 2018-19 Cycle Girls Education- call for speaker suggestions and hostesses
3. One Sky Is expanding — our new Peninsula Chapter
4. Upcoming survey and One Sky Improvements

1. 2017-18 Grant Winners

This past cycle we gave out a total of $57,346 to our 6 finalists.

• Domestic:
  Ignite – $13,500 (group winner)
  VoteRunLead – $5850
  Voter Participation Project – $15,050
  The Women’s March Network $4069
• International:
  RiseUp – $13,600 (group winner)
  NDI – $3500

2. 2018-19 Girls Education

Call for speaker suggestions: Do you know or know of someone who would be a dynamite speaker for One Sky on the topic of current needs, trends, learnings in girls education, either within or outside the US? If so, please let us know and we will get in touch to see if they would be a good speaker for one of our events!

Call for hostesses: Would you like to host a One Sky event at your home or office? Let us know! It’s fun, easy, and you don’t even have to leave your home 🙂

Leadership opportunities: There are a number of opportunities as part of One Sky including Membership Chair, Treasurer and helping Lisa lead the Grant Screening committee. Please raise your hand if you are interested in helping to steer our fearless group. We will also be sending more information on this in our next newsletter.

Our 2018-19 Calendar and the mid-terms: We are back on our regular schedule of having educational events in November – April and the annual meeting and ballot in October. This year we will have no events until after the mid-terms as we know many of you are spending all your spare time focused on that! If your plate is already overflowing with political action you’ve and donated everything you can, great! If you are looking for ways to get involved (like coming to Arizona with me to Get Out The Vote right before the election) let me know I will have ideas for you for any level of time and/or financial capacity, there’s only one month left!

3. One Sky Giving Circle is expanding to the Peninsula!

Starting this fall we will be launching a Peninsula Chapter of OSGC. This will allow us to welcome many new members, increase the size of our grants and/or potentially offer multi-year grants, as well as expand our network. We plan to offer back to back events – one evening in SF and one evening on the Peninsula. Members will be welcome to attend either event – whatever is most convenient. We will continue to have one nomination process, one grant screening committee and one vote to determine which organizations the entire giving circle funds. With the launch of this new chapter, we will be raising our annual dues to $750. Current members will be grandfathered in at $500, but of course are welcome to give more! We are off to a great start with about 15 new members so far.

If you have friends from the Peninsula who would like to join, please send their name and email address to Jen Sweeney, jen.sweeney9@gmail.com. The more new members we can get the more we can grant! You can refer friends to our website www.oneskygivingcircle.org to learn more about how OSGC works.

4. Upcoming survey and One Sky Improvements

Please keep a lookout for a One Sky Survey coming at you in the next week or so. We are looking to get feedback on your experience as a One Sky member and your ideas for how we can continue to grow and improve our group to maximize impact while staying efficient and keeping our events friendly and low key.

Thank you and looking forward to another great year of One Skying together,

Maryam Mohit
One Sky Giving Circle