On Thursday, October 14, 2010, Washington area women came together for their annual luncheon to take stock of grant-making efforts to improve the lives of women, children, and families in the capital region. As is recognized by the United Nations, 'advancing the rights of women and children advances humanity.'

That, and recently the foundation released a report that shows that poverty has increased by 16 percent for women and girls in the region. Couple that with the fact that two-thirds of women running households in the region spend 30 percent of their salaries on housing and day care. Moreover, women with infants spend 52 percent of the median income for a single mother in the region on housing and daycare for their child. What is left for food, clothes, and basic necessities? Not much.

The Washington Area Women's Foundation was created by a group of women having tea one afternoon in Bethesda in 1997. Now thirteen years later, the foundation, funded entirely through charitable donations, has granted over $1 million to local nonprofits annually since 2006. While they support many local nonprofits, their centerpiece initiative is the Stepping Stone's Project, the objective of which is to build the long-term economic security and financial independence of low-income, women-headed families.

The room was filled - by my best guess -  with over two-hundred women and a handful of men sitting at the tables of corporate sponsors like Capitol One and the George Washington University. I was lucky enough to sit at the University's table and from that vantage point see the dedication of some of the area's most successful women to helping raise up those most in need. But even with such institutional participation, the message was one of local and personal involvement. "Anyone can be a philanthropist," is the motto of the year, encouraging giving and giving back by one and all.

The presentation started at the global and then turned to the local. First we remembered that Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5 lags well behind all the others, but MDG 5 is critical towards lifting communities (and countries) out of poverty.

For some perspective on that, in 2000 the world's leaders set eight major goals, the MDGs, to combat the causes and effects of poverty the world over and endeavoring to make major impacts by 2015. Optimism met (some) funding.

MDG 5 is to reduce by three-quarters the global maternal mortality rate, but the interim goal of significantly reducing educational discrimination against women by 2005 hasn't kept pace with our hopes. Just this month, UN Women announced that $750 million is all that is needed - in the grand scheme of things that figure is not that high - between now and 2015 to adequately treat the 2 to 3.5 million women living with the effects of obstetric fistula.

If you are not familiar with fistula, you ought to be. Usually caused by birthing delays wherein a woman would benefit from a caesarian to relieve pressure, the baby dies and the women is left incontinent. The effects are devastating in the short and the long term, as her baby dies and then she is shunned by her community for the lingering effects.

Fistula is not a realistic concern in the United States where we can generally access basic medical care, but the factors that drive such a preventable and treatable problem to persist globally are similar to the factors that cause women in our own community to need help and support.

Feminism means many things to many people, but at some of its fundamental elements it can be tied to reproduction and childrearing. Many might suggest that feminist goals, diverse as they may be, forget about children and families. But the Washington Area Women's Foundation efforts to educate and support lays rest to that impression, at least in D.C..

The grant recipients sat with the donors at the luncheon, and I was honored to hear about the Crittenton Services of Greater Washington which provides teen pregnancy prevention services and, when needed, support to pregnant teenage girls. We also heard from two amazing speakers: Glenn Hopkins and Lorraine Fells.

Glenn Hopkins started a new nonprofit called Hopkins House. One of the major data points that the foundation recently uncovered is that single parents in the D.C. area generally spend over half their salary for day care services; ironically, however, most day care workers cannot afford day care. Hopkins House trains day care workers and works with local programs to ensure that their salaries match their skills and the wages needed to raise a family in this area.

And we heard from Lorraine Fells. A charming woman just past her sixty-fifth birthday, Fells, a lifelong D.C. resident, spent nearly forty years addicted to heroin. In order to support her family, she also dealt heroin until she was arrested in 1989. Then, through the support of Good Will of Greater Washington, now a foundation grantee, she got methadone treatment, she turned her life around, and she has been clean ever since. Now she works with Good Will to help give others the help and support she received.

The Foundation also released "2010 Portrait of Women & Girls in the Washington Metropolitan Area," a report compiled with the help of the Urban Institute and other major partners to provide an accurate snapshot of the real economic and educational state of women and girls in the region.  The foundation is taking the results to the White House for three listening sessions this year, and wants the community to read and discuss the report.

The report is a goldmine of facts. There are far too many to share them all here, but here are some of the most interesting findings:

Women and girls in the Washington region are more likely to be women of color, have health insurance, be lesbian or bisexual, and more likely to own businesses than women nationally.  Nearly one-quarter of women and girls in our region are foreign-born. In the District of Columbia, women's rates of voting and volunteering are higher than among D.C. men and among women nationally.

And while twice as many women in the region have bachelor's and graduate degrees than the nation overall, more than one-quarter of women-numbering nearly one-half million women-in the region have no education or training beyond high school.

All appearances aside, this is not just a girls club. The foundation also is seeking men who "get it" to increase its charitable donor base. But as Cokie Roberts pointed out at last year's luncheon, women on average each year donate 3.5 percent of their investable assets each year, compared with only 1.8 percent for men.