Last week, the West Marin Fund launched a new program aimed at empowering women and girls in the area. The fund awarded $71,500 to eight local nonprofits that proposed projects focused specifically on supporting those demographics. “The idea of women’s and girls’ empowerment is one of several threads we’re following at the moment, and it coincides with what nonprofits and donors are interested in,” the fund’s executive director, Sarah Hobson, said. “It resonates with where society is going.” Recipients include the Bolinas Community Land Trust, the Community Land Trust Association of West Marin, Gallery Route One, Papermill Creek’s Children’s Corner, the Point Reyes National Seashore Association, the San Geronimo Valley Community Center, West Marin Community Services and West Marin Senior Services. The fund will host two meetings over the course of the year so that the nonprofits can share ideas and information with one another. Ms. Hobson said it was important to support a range of organizations that could address issues of inequity in different ways. “We felt it was really important to be supporting work in the Latino and Anglo communities: supporting women having challenges in the professional world, in the community and in the home,” Ms. Hobson said. “This kind of mix is really important to genuinely support girls’ and women’s empowerment, bringing everyone together to be more effective.” Over half of the grants are tailored toward profession development within the organizations. The $8,000 grant to the Point Reyes National Seashore Association will support ongoing assessment and coaching to discover employee strengths and the best ways to leverage them both within the nonprofit and the park itself. At West Marin Senior Services, executive director Skip Schwartz is “trying to provide opportunities for all of our women employees”—roughly 70 percent of the organization’s 30 employees. The $8,000 grant might support E.S.L. classes, training in marketing, grant writing or administration. “We’d like to be able to sponsor that so that somebody doesn’t have do it on their own. That way you can go to school on company time,” Mr. Schwartz said. Grants totaling $9,500 will focus on health and wellness programs for women and girls at the San Geronimo Valley Community Center and, at Papermill Creek Children’s Corner, training for parents—specifically, Latina mothers—in taking a more active role in the education system. The school will partner with a host of organizations to provide workshops in Spanish so parents can understand how to do things like make a formal complaint or understand whether their children will be on track to graduate. “The need I’ve seen in the community is not the lack of participation from parents, but the lack of knowledge on how to make change,” the center’s executive director, Lourdes Romo, said. “Aiming high, I would like to have our Shoreline Unified School District board represent our community, and it doesn’t right now. I’d like to start small, start slow, making a really strong foundation so that the end goal is parents and legal guardians able to say, ‘Okay, I know how to do this, I know what this means, I can run for the board, I can be part of this—it’s not just for the other part of the community, it’s for all of us.’” Elizabeth Fenwick, an instructor with the Latino Photography Project, said the group planned to use its $9,500 grant to bring Latina mentors to classes to teach the students—all of whom are currently female. The funding will also help produce a book and a show out of a new project called “She Inspires Me.” Ms. Fenwick believes that bringing in Latina photographers—and paying them for their time—is crucial to the development of her students. “I want them to have role models,” she said. “There is something about being able to see another woman who is excelling at something that you’re learning. [It] is always a good thing.”