About Us
board
Chair
Paulette has worked on women's rights, economic justice, and philanthropic consulting for 30 years. She founded Women's Initiative for Self Employment (WISE), a San Franciscononprofit that trains and finances low-income women to start microenterprises. Paulette is currently Chair of the WDN Board. She is also Chair of Equal Rights Advocates (ERA), a national women's rights law firm. ERA engages in high impact ...
Vice Chair
Deborah Drysdale, PhD recently "retired" from her 30 year private practice as a family therapist, clinical consultant, and teacher in San Francisco. Committed to working for social justice on a deep and strategic level, she has rekindled her 60's civil rights, anti-war, and feminist efforts and "come out" as a donor activist. Her special interests are in movement building, ...
Secretary
After an early chequered career as an academic, Nancy has spent the last 25 years as a social and political activist, donor organizer, fundraiser, and consultant to foundations and individual donors, as well as NGO's. She is currently a senior consultant with Fusion Consultants, which provides a full range of capacity building services for progressive nonprofit organizations and ...
Treasurer
Wendy C. Wolf, PhD is a political activist and philanthropist who is interested in organizing women donors in support of progressive social change. She is one of the key individuals organizing the Women Donors Network's work on reproductive justice. She is the treasurer of WDN's board, as well as the head of WDN's action activities. She has worked tirelessly to elect ...
Nancy Aronson is happily retired, splitting her time between New Orleans and Vermont. She has a B.A. and M.B.A. from Tulane University and and M.S.W. from McGill. She worked in the child welfare field for a number of years, had two children and then became the founding Executive Director of the Institute of Mental Hygiene (IMH) a private foundation that supports progressive ...
A donor activist, Kathy partners with progressive donors, political activists as well as non-profit organizations. She is a National Advisor for the Global Fund for Women, Chair of the VerdePartnershipGarden's Executive Committee (a school based community garden in Richmond CA), a new Board member of the Women Donors Network, and is one of the founders of WDN's Reproductive ...
Chris Desser is a fellow of the Tomales Bay Institute, a think tank focused on developing the concept of The Commons as an overarching analytical structure organizing across sectors and disciplines. Her current focus is The Catalog of Extinct Experience, an art installation about extinct and vanishing experiences in the natural world-like sipping water from a stream or seeing stars in the ...
As a Board member of WDN for the past year, Laurie values the opportunity to connect with other women who care about social justice. She is excited about being part of a community of progressive women who are both givers and doers. Her philanthropy, financial resources, and time primarily focus on being a volunteer for foster youth with San Francisco CASA, Microcredit ...
Josie majored in Business in college because she thought it would get her a good job and because it didn't require a minor so she could take lots of electives. But, no one told her that "women's lib" hadn't happened yet. So she entered the business world at Fairchild Semiconductor as an Intermediate Clerk. During her 7 years there, she was the ...