Women Giving For Spartanburg celebrates 15 years, looks ahead to future of philanthropy

Julie Lowry remembers getting that first call in the spring of 2007.

Mary Thomas and Sally Foster wanted to share an idea and make an offer.

“My first reaction was ‘uh oh, something’s up,’” Lowry recalled. “Because these two ladies, power brokers that they are, would not just be calling me for a chat.”

Thomas was then Executive Vice President of the Spartanburg County Foundation and Foster the Foundation’s board chair.

Lowry had been a founder and chair for other civic efforts and groups.

The idea was the creation of Women Giving for Spartanburg, a “giving circle” of women who would pool their charitable giving to magnify its effect on the community.

It was a rising trend in philanthropy that was spreading across the nation. The giving circle model was created by Colleen Willoughby, founder of the Washington Womens’ Foundation in 1995. Today, there are more than 2,000 giving circles across the U.S., involving more than 150,000 members, the vast majority of them women. Together they have given more than $1.3 billion.

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A 1998 People magazine story about Willoughby and a presentation at a Council on Foundations conference a few years later generated tremendous enthusiasm for the idea, especially for Foster, Thomas said.

Foster, who passed away in 2019, was known to people across the nation as the founder and namesake of a fund-raising gift-wrap company. In Spartanburg, she was also a well-known philanthropist and civic leader. She served on numerous boards around Spartanburg and as CFO of the South Carolina ETV endowment before joining the County Foundation board, where she “got excited about this novel idea of collective giving,” Thomas said.

Getting started in Spartanburg  

That excitement led to site visits with leaders of recently started giving circles in Charlotte, and Asheville and Greenville, which provided a framework to get the ball rolling in Spartanburg.

Lowry agreed to serve as founding board chair for Spartanburg Women Giving and recruited a co-chair, Tracy Hannah, a friend and longtime collaborator on charitable projects around town.

With the leadership in place, the group got to work, recruiting members and establishing the group with the help of the Foundation.

“Our goal from the time we started until the end of the year (2007) was to get 50 members,” Lowry said. “By the end of the year we had about 125 women who had signed up and made their donations. They didn’t hesitate.” Today, there are more than 160 members.

Members commit to an annual contribution of $1,200. Junior memberships, available to women under 35, are $600. The opportunities for service are the same, but regular members get more votes on grantees. Anyone who is interested in joining and able to make the commitment is welcome.

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Each year, the group gets grant requests, which are vetted and then winnowed to about a dozen finalists. Those organizations make presentations at an annual “showcase” event, after which members vote on where the grants should go.

The concept is described as “democratizing philanthropy.”

In its 15 years, the group has made more than $3 million in grants to 75 different non-profits that serve Spartanburg.

Women Giving focuses on making high-impact grants, large enough to make a big difference in helping an organization advance its mission.

This year, the group awarded eight grants, which ranged from $10,500 to $24,000.

“The power of collective giving is more than money,” Thomas said, describing it as “philanthropy beyond charity, beyond writing a check. Women Giving for Spartanburg can really move the needle on critical issues. They’re building social capital among themselves and, of course, among the non-profit community.”

Dorman graduate realizes love for Spartanburg

In the spring of 2007, around the time Women Giving was founded, Weslie Higdon was looking forward to her senior year at Dorman High School, then going away to college. Having an impact on Spartanburg was not on her radar.

“Like a lot of young people, I thought ‘I’m leaving this place and I’m never coming back,’” Higdon said.

But after an undergraduate degree at Clemson, a master's at Georgia and beginning her career, she found both a job and a place she loves – back home in Spartanburg.

Higdon is the Director of Development for the South Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind Foundation, where she has worked since 2016.

“I realized that I love Spartanburg. I love that it has everything that I want without a lot of the hassle that comes with living in a bigger city,” Higdon said, adding that she didn’t appreciate that in high school, “but when I moved back and I was in my 20s, I did.”

Higdon said that as she began to put down roots here, she started looking for a way to connect. Women Giving for Spartanburg was a perfect fit.

She joined as a junior member and dove in – she has served on the board for four of her five years with the group and is serving as chair this year.

At 32, she is comfortably the youngest to hold that position in the group’s 15 years.

“I think it just gives me a different perspective because all of the other chairs have been more established in their family life, in their careers,” she said.

Lowry says that she is happy to see new generations of Women Giving taking a leadership role.

“This whole new generation of younger women in Spartanburg, they are on the ball,” she said. “Some of them are natives, some have come from other cities and states. They’ve joined Women Giving and they get out there and they work.”

Junior memberships are an important part of getting 20- and young 30-somethings involved, Lowry says. “They start out enjoying it and want to do it and they will continue, and then in comes an influx of new people. That’s how it should be.”

For her part, Higdon says that having founders like Lowry as role models and mentors is inspiring.

“Just seeing the passion that she still has for the organization,” Higdon said. “I’m a big believer in learning from the past. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We can build upon what they started.”

Bringing in new members is a big goal for Women Giving. Higdon, the mother of a three-month-old, says she understands why it’s sometimes a difficult decision for women in her age group to commit.

“I think that every organization, not just Women Giving, has a little bit of a problem tapping into the mid-30s crowd. Most of us have young children, so that’s your priority,” she said. “It’s hard because resources are limited – not just money, but time.”

The key is showing that it’s worth the investment, she said.

A Solid Foundation

One of the key assets that Women Giving was able to leverage as it began 15 years ago was the support and expertise of the Spartanburg County Foundation and its staff.

“The Foundation incubated Women Giving for the first 18 months,” said Thomas, who now serves as the Foundation’s Chief Operating Officer and the Executive Director of Robert Hett Chapman III Center for Philanthropy. “We trained them how to do that work. We modeled what it means to be a leader in philanthropy.”

The education was effective. Though it is still considered a “special project” of the County Foundation, “our hand is very limited in what they do – they pretty much run their own organization,” Thomas says. “That’s what’s been so interesting and fun to watch with Women Giving. The energy that they bring, the excitement to work with their peers, who really care about Spartanburg.”

WANT TO KNOW MORE? 

For information about how to join, how to apply for a grant, and more: womengivingspartanburg.org

This story will appear in the Fall 2022 edition of Spartanburg Magazine. '

This article originally appeared on Herald-Journal: Women Giving For Spartanburg celebrates 15 years of philanthropy