The Hewlett Foundation started its work on Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE) in 2015 to help women achieve “greater agency, opportunities, and control over resources.” We sought to reach this goal by making grants to develop critical policymaking inputs: gender-disaggregated data, improved macroeconomic research, and advocacy to make gender differences visible.
We are excited to announce the release of our refreshed Global Reproductive Equity strategy (English and French). We are immensely grateful for the generosity of our grantee partners, peer funders, and other important stakeholders who informed this work. As we launch the strategy, we are sharing reflections on the process and a preview of the…
The problem of political polarization was the original impetus for the Hewlett Foundation to launch its U.S. Democracy Program more than seven years ago. Since then, Hewlett has made millions of dollars in grants to mitigate the impact of polarization on Congress. Grantees have helped create conditions for significant reforms, including in support of the…
In 2020, the Hewlett Foundation Cyber Initiative engaged evaluation consultants Jodi Nelson and Claire McGuinnes to evaluate its “talent pipeline” grantmaking strategy, which provides funding to universities to train “experts with the necessary mix of technical and non-technical skills and knowledge to staff” the core cyber policy institutions fostered by the initiative, as well as …
The past year has been one of the most tumultuous in the history of American democracy. The major developments that occurred during it are mind-boggling. These included the COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying economic shutdown; the renewed push for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder; a sharply contested election conducted amid social distancing…
Some parts of the world are emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, but many others like India are facing their deadliest periods of the crisis. As if that were not enough, uncertainty about how economies will recover persists, and we are still confronted by the challenge of our lifetime: climate change. When it comes to oil…
In March 2018, the Hewlett Foundation’s board approved a two-year, $10 million exploratory grantmaking effort to examine potential successors to neoliberalism, the intellectual paradigm that has dominated our economic and policy debates for the past 40 years. This exploration was predicated on the belief that neoliberalism has outlived its usefulness and needs to be replaced …
I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles in the embrace of yellow-brown chaparral hills that would burst briefly into verdant green after rare winter rains. My family home was, and still is, nestled in the southern foothills of my hometown. Twice during my childhood, a portion of those yellow-brown hills burst instead into…
The compounding and connected crises of the last few months — the COVID pandemic and its inequitable toll on Black and Latinx communities, the unprecedented politicization of public health, economic crises hitting Main Street harder than Wall Street, the rallying cries to address deep-seated racism in public institutions meant to protect and serve all Americans…
In 2017, the Hewlett Foundation’s board renewed its third five-year commitment to our Climate Initiative. The new climate strategy aims to achieve deep decarbonization by midcentury, focusing on the biggest emitting regions (the United States, China, India and Europe), six thematic areas (Transportation; Electricity; Industry; Finance; Strategic Communications and Carbon dioxide removal). This strategy is …