The New York Women’s Foundation will begin its 40th year under new leadership. Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, a Brooklyn native who leads the Environmental Grantmakers Association, has been named the foundation’s next president and chief executive, the board announced on October 27. She starts at the beginning of the new year.
She succeeds Ana L. Oliveira, who is stepping down after more than 20 years in the role. Under Oliveira, the foundation’s annual grantmaking grew from $1.7 million to more than $10 million, with grants going to work on economic justice, health and bodily autonomy, and civic engagement. The appointment closes one of the longest leadership runs in women’s philanthropy, and the board chose a successor whose career has been built on a single conviction: the people closest to a problem should hold the resources to solve it.
Toles O’Laughlin has run the Environmental Grantmakers Association for more than five years. The association is a network of more than 200 foundations worldwide, holding roughly $200 billion in assets and granting more than $2.95 billion a year to environmental causes. Before that, she was North America director at 350.org and 350 Action and executive director of the Maryland Environmental Health Network. She founded Climate Critical, a support network that works on burnout in the environmental workforce. She also chairs the Good Trouble Fund at the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, which backs grassroots campaigns and advocates, and she holds multiple advanced degrees in law, energy, and environmental policy.
“We are excited to welcome Tamara at such an important moment for The New York Women’s Foundation,” said Mary Baglivo and Tanya Odom, co-chairs of the board of directors. “Tamara understands that communities know what they need, and that philanthropy is most powerful when it backs their leadership. She recognizes the strength of what has been built and sees how much more is possible.”
Anne E. Delaney and Lola C. West, who co-chaired the search committee, said Toles O’Laughlin set herself apart during a national search. “Tamara is a rigorous thinker who knows how to listen,” they said. “She came into every conversation with a clear sense of what she could bring to The Foundation and how she could continue to grow its impact. She knows where she wants to go and how to bring people with her.”
Oliveira, for her part, pointed to temperament as much as strategy. “She listens before deciding what needs to happen next and understands that our role is not to arrive with the answers,” Oliveira said. “It is to stand alongside the women and gender-expansive leaders who know their communities and make sure they have the resources to lead.”
The foundation she inherits has put money behind movements that larger funders often reach late, among them disability justice and LGBTQIA communities. Its stated model is to invest early and to trust communities to lead. The board presents that model as the standard philanthropy should meet, not an exception to it, and Toles O’Laughlin’s record in environmental grantmaking follows the same line: accountability runs to the people most affected by a decision, not only to the people who made it.
“The New York Women’s Foundation addresses deeply connected issues shaping people’s lives,” Toles O’Laughlin said. “What happens in your home, neighborhood and community shapes what is possible in every other part of your life. The Foundation has long trusted women and gender-expansive leaders to understand the connections and build solutions within their own communities, on their own terms. That belief in community is what draws me to The Foundation and what I intend to carry forward.”
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