We recently connected with Susan Blaustein and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Susan, you’ve got such an interesting story, but before we jump into that, let’s first talk about a topic near and dear to us – generosity. We think success, happiness and wellbeing depends on authentic generosity and empathy and so we’d love to hear about how you become such a generous person – where do you think your generosity comes from?
I believe my sense of generosity comes from my grandpa, a sweet, ingenious man with a twinkle in his eye. The son of east European immigrants, he quit high school in 1911 to develop a formula for lead-free gasoline that he built into an oil company he and his dad called The American Oil Company. AMOCO subsequently merged with a larger firm to become a mammoth multinational, and my grandfather became wealthy and influential, particularly in Democratic leadership and Jewish circles.
My grandfather also had a keen sense of social justice: as a Jew who subscribed wholeheartedly to the Talmudic directive to “repair the world,” he helped instill the human rights provisions in the United Nations Charter in 1945, called for a two-state solution in Palestine well before there was a Jewish state, worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to draft the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and called for a UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in 1963, 30 years before the OHCHR was finally established by the UN General Assembly. He served as Senior Vice-President of The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, positioning him to help determine those eligible for reparations for crimes committed by Germany during World War II, and he advised every Israeli prime minister and U.S. president on Middle Eastern affairs until his death in 1970. I believe that his tireless work to advance human rights and justice account for my own sense of justice, my work ethic, and my generosity.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
TTen years ago, I founded WomenStrong International, a global women’s organization that supports, strengthens, and convenes local women-led organizations all over the world. At WomenStrong, we offer these bold, dynamic non-profits a multi-pronged approach: unrestricted, trust-based funding; capacity strengthening in the areas each partner says it needs; and the opportunity to come together in our WomenStrong Learning Lab, where they can learn from each other, collaborate, and share their solutions on the global stage.
We currently work with 19 partner organizations in 17 countries – five in Asia, nine across sub-Saharan Africa, and five in the Americas – working in their communities to advance reproductive health, girls’ education, women’s economic security, and to stop violence against women and girls.
We will soon be opening a fifth cohort of women-led organizations focused on the intersections of gender and climate or environmental justice, perhaps the most pressing issue of our time. We urge anyone interested in our work to have a look at our website and to consider supporting us during our “Strong Women, Stronger World” campaign this fall, so that we might continue to grow our vibrant community of practice, and, with women in the lead, to strengthen our world.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
For me, the qualities of empathy, the ability to listen hard, and the understanding that challenges are multilayered and solutions must be multisectoral are central to who I am. I believe these attributes were developed during my first career, as an award-winning composer and professor of music, where all these qualities – the capacity for empathy, lyricism, and moving the human heart, the ability to listen deeply, and the practice of taking an architectural or 3D view of a problem and its necessarily complex solutions – came from that training.
Leading Columbia University’s urban development project for more than a decade across the sub-Saharan region also taught me a great deal about each of these qualities, which I continue to rely on every day — to gain knowledge, conceptualize solutions to problems, work in close partnership with others to design, resource, and implement effective strategies, and to learn from the outcomes how better to address the next challenge.
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
We are eager to partner with other funders – high net worth individuals, foundations, bi- and multilateral agencies, international nongovernmental organizations, the private sector – that are committed to women’s rights and gender justice, including those interested in supporting bold women-led organizations focused on the intersections of gender and climate and/or environmental justice.
We are also eager to partner with journalists, podcasters, and researchers interested in spotlighting the remarkable work of our WomenStrong partners – from our brave partner working underground to educate girls in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, to those ensuring adolescent access to contraception in the Philippines, Madagascar, Zambia, and Mali, to those training women workers to organize for their labor rights in Indian, Bangladesh, Uganda, and El Salvador, to those seeking to stop violence against women and girls in Cambodia, Kenya, Rwanda, Guatemala, Mexico, and the U.S..
We believe it is imperative to share the compelling strategies and outcomes of these organizations, so that their effective solutions are not limited to the contexts in which they were first devised, but can be adapted to countless other localities where they can help improve the lives of women and girls across the globe.
If this vision is one you share, WomenStrong would love to explore ways to collaborate. You can get in touch via our Contact Us page or by email at [email protected].
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.womenstrong.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/womenstrongintl/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/womenstrongintl/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/all/?fetchDeterministicClustersOnly=true&heroEntityKey=urn%3Ali%3Aorganization%3A10525590&keywords=womenstrong%20international&origin=RICH_QUERY_SUGGESTION&position=0&searchId=59279e03-b6cb-4e0f-945a-fb2cd687fe55&sid=pko&spellCorrectionEnabled=false
Image Credits
Women’s Health to Wealth, Ghana
Roots of Health, Philippines
Women’s Justice Initiative, Guatemala
Gender and Development for Cambodia
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
