NoVo Foundation is Built on Partnership; Founders Champion Gender Equality
If a foundation’s mission is to build more healthy partnerships in the world, what better place to start than with their own internal partnerships?
In fact, for Peter and Jennifer Buffett of the NoVo Foundation, developing their own partnership as a couple coincided with developing the mission of their foundation, which is to transform relationships across the globe from “domination and exploitation” to “collaboration and partnership.”
I had approached NoVo wanting to talk to either Jennifer or Peter individually, but, apropos of their partnership approach to philanthropy, I got them both. They spoke to me by phone from their home in the Hudson Valley, about two hours north of New York City.
Spouses Jennifer and Peter Buffett serve as NoVo’s co-presidents. They are highly conscious of gender roles, and how even among seemingly well-meaning and high-minded people, patriarchal attitudes and structures are often still present. They found this to be the case for themselves, “I’m a nice guy and she’s an outspoken woman,” says Peter, “but we were reenacting certain toxic roles,” he says of the early days of their relationship. Namely, that the wife serves as handmaiden supporting her husband in his endeavors. To combat this tendency, the Buffetts, who met in 1991 in Milwaukee, co-lead NoVo, and have assembled a racially and gender-diverse staff of 26 to run the foundation. In 2016, NoVo directed approximately $100 million in grants to organizations in the U.S. and overseas. . .