Dear WIN Donors and Friends,
On behalf of the WIN Executive Committee, we hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with your loved ones and are looking forward to the upcoming holiday season. We’re writing to take a few moments to thank those of you who participated in our recent Women’s Impact Network strategy session on November 10 and 11. For those who weren’t able to join us on campus, we missed you! This year, for the first time, we invited all WIN donors, plus multiple on-campus leaders to Day 1 and leadership-level donors to Day 2. Prior to the formal meeting kick-off, we held the first of two information sessions with potential grant applicants as this year's grant application process has officially kicked off!
Just a reminder of our mission: WIN is a women-led philanthropic organization committed to the continuous advancement of women in STEM across WPI's local and global community.
I like to say even more simply, we are women and volunteer led and we have two purposes - we raise money that we use to fund grants that support women in STEM on and associated with WPI's campus.
Here are the highlights for you:
Our overall impact continues to increase. The Women's Impact Network at WPI was founded in 2016, a brain-child of former WPI President Laurie Leshin, along with current Vice President of University Advancement Donna Stock and several prominent WPI friends and alumnae, many of whom continue to be actively engaged. In just seven years we have raised nearly $1.8 million from more than 200 alumnae, alumni, friends, faculty, and staff of WPI. We've awarded $1.6 million in grants to 90 projects, though we've had 183 grant applications totaling $4.3 million. This demonstrates the demand for this type of support on and associated with campus, and shows that with additional support we'll be able to increase our grants!
We had four objectives for the weekend, and the feedback suggests we met these goals:
- Interact with the new President of WPI, Dr. Grace Wang, and understand how we can partner to serve her mission.
- See WIN funded projects in action and hear about their impact from the grantees.
- Interact with WPI faculty and student leaders who identify as female to understand their experience on campus (we’re operating off of our own decades-old model in most cases).
- Discuss the future of WIN as we look to increase our impact over the coming years.
Friday we began by learning more about the impact of two recent WIN Impact Grant Awards. Jessica Rosewitz, assistant teaching professor in civil, environmental, and architectural engineering, and Arne Gericke, interim dean of undergraduate studies, presented the Undergraduate Summer Research Program. Undergraduate students Ava Dickman, Amina Laddaoui, Xahria Hatch, Alyssa Carta, Reilly Desai, Kerstin Andrews, and Elizaveta Tcherniaeva presented posters presentations from six of the seven research projects that were funded by a WIN Impact grant during summer 2023. Then Elizabeth DiLoreto, a WPI PhD candidate, told us about the Women in STEM Book Club, also funded by a WIN Impact Grant, including how this group is helping to build community among graduate student women and what books they’ve read.
President Grace Wang provided a campus update and shared how she sees WIN being able to partner with her and campus leadership on achieving the university’s strategic goals. A key priority is to increase the funnel of applicants to WPI, and we discussed numerous ideas for how WIN could support this priority.
We toured the Cote Materials Science lab, hosted by Kyle Tsaknopoulos, '15, MS '17, PhD '19 and the Rocketry Club Lab Space, hosted by Aunika Yasui, '24. Impressive work going on at WPI led by female students and faculty! Finally, we had a networking reception in Sagamore Labs and then a casual dinner at the Oak Barrel Tavern, nearby in Worcester.
Saturday we heard a WIN executive committee update as well as updates from all three of our hard-working committees - Impact, Governance, and Engagement. Each of these committees has made tremendous progress over the past year, coming out of our Five-year Assessment in summer 2021, led by Beth Alletto and Beth Phalen '85, and our retreat last fall. We closed the morning with a critical strategic discussion, led by Donna Stock and President Grace Wang, about options for how we increase our partnership with University Advancement in order to expand our impact.
Over lunch Saturday we heard from student representatives from the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at WPI - separately, we also attended their event a few days later.
We also met with a broadly representative group of Student Leaders from the WPI community that identify as women to learn more about the experience of being a woman in STEM at WPI today. We did this last year for the first time and found it so incredibly insightful that we decided to do it again. The objective was to ensure that our thinking about what we are solving for on campus is current, as many, though certainly not all, of the members of WIN graduated decades ago. We were impressed with these young women and happy to hear they felt like WPI is a super-inclusive campus with many resources to support them. We were also somewhat surprised and a little disappointed to hear that many of the dynamics that we experienced on campus, and for many of us in our careers, remain. It did reinforce for us the opportunity that WIN must continue to impact women and those that identify as women on campus and across the WPI community.
Finally, we heard from one final WIN Impact Grant recipient - Francesca Bernardi, assistant professor of mathematical sciences, who shared the Girls Talk Math program that she brought from University of North Carolina and the University of Maryland. The high school students participating in the program shared their presentations, and we also heard from several of the WPI students involved in the program. Finally, several of the high school students' parents shared the impact these projects had on their kids. We closed out the day with a fun, casual dinner at The Fix Burger Bar, which is fast becoming our favorite restaurant!
It was a very productive weekend with tremendous learning and great fun. We look forward to welcoming more of you to future in-person events, and we plan to announce next year’s in-person strategy session date soon so you can mark your calendars to join us.
We are also finalizing the date for our WIN grant event this spring, likely to be held in April. It's always an inspiring day as we award this year's grants and hand out the traditional large checks!
Thank you again for your support of WIN! And, please feel free to reach out with questions.
WIN Executive Committee
Patti Newcomer Small ’90 co-chair
Beth Anne Willett ’93 co-chair (+ co-chair of Engagement Committee with Rachel LeBlanc, '02, '08, '13)
Audrey Fitzgerald (co-chair of Impact Committee)
Erica Mason ‘96
Maureen McCaffrey ‘86
Janet O’Leary ‘84 (co-chair of Governance Committee)
Karen Oliver ‘82 (co-chair of Impact Committee)
Karen Tegan Padir ‘90
Beth Phalen ‘85 (co-chair of Governance Committee)
Donna Stock
Joan Szkutak ‘79
Jenn Wyse ‘94
Beth Alletto, ex-officio