Alumnae Committee Co-chair Corner

Welcome to the seventh issue of the SisterMentors Alumnae Association Quarterly Newsletter!  This newsletter serves as a space where we can uplift each other while continuing to grow our powerful sisterhood.  We are unique in that we are a gathering place for Black and Brown women doctorates and college graduates to dialogue with each other. 

We hope you are encouraged to continue the legacy we have built together with SisterMentors by reaching out to a fellow SisterMentors alumna or your mentee to see how they are doing, attending one of our upcoming programs, and listening to the SisterMentors podcasts. We also encourage you to consider a donation to SisterMentors.  The goal is to increase members of our Dream Builders Society. These funds are to help with the services we provide to our women and girls, including college visits and writing retreats. Please contact Dr. Lewis at director@sistermentors.org, if interested in donating to support the sustainability of the SisterMentors program.

Words from Our Founder

I hope you are all having a great spring. Given all that is happening in the world today, I hope you are doing intentional self-care every day. This spring, we are very busy here at SisterMentors. Our girls and young women returned to multi-day overnight visits to college campuses where they had an immersive experience attending classes, meeting with women of color undergraduates, eating in the dining halls, meeting with the president of the college, and so much more. We visited Bryn Mawr and Haverford College and spent most of our time at Bryn Mawr where the college laid out the red carpet for our girls and young women.

 

We are also planning a trip to New York City, where mentors and mentees will be hosted by one of the few Black women curators in the US who curated the current Harlem Renaissance exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. Our women doctoral students will also attend our annual multi-day, overnight writing retreat at Yogaville. And so much more is happening. It is a whirlwind of program activities as we readjust and reinvent with Covid and other respiratory illnesses still with us.

 

Please consider attending our in-person convening on June 8, 2024, in downtown Washington, D.C. We will keep our virtual annual reunion on June 29, 2024, so that is an alternative if you are unable to attend the in-person event. I hope you are doing wonderful things with your higher education degrees since the world today needs all of us to step up and, step in, to help make this planet a more just, peaceful, and equitable place for all. Happy spring!

 

Featured Doctorate

Adrienne Smith, Ph.D. in Public and Community Health

Adrienne M. Smith is the Director of the Division of Policy and Performance Management (DPPM) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office on Women’s Health (OWH). In this capacity, she oversees activities focused on women's health policy, program development/evaluation, strategic planning, and performance management.

 

Adrienne says that she would not have completed her Ph.D. without dissertation support from SisterMentors. She joined the program in 2000 as she was entering the dissertation proposal phase of the Ph.D. program. With prior training and an academic focus on minority and women’s health, she was clear on the general direction of her doctoral research. However, she was not clear on the scope of her dissertation study. SisterMentors was an anchor of motivation to focus, survey, investigate, write, analyze, and infer contributions to the field of public health based on the conclusions of her dissertation, Sociocultural Contributors to Obesity Among African American Women:  Do African American Men’s Body Size Preferences for Women Play a Role?

 

In 2001, she successfully obtained a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Public and Community Health from the School of Public Health at the University of Maryland, College Park. Adrienne is also trained as a Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES), and a graduate of the Federal Executive Institute’s Center for Leadership Development.

 

News from Our Alumnae

Jennifer will do a read-aloud of her children’s book, “I Am an Anti-Racist Superhero,” on Saturday, April 13, 2024, from 3 pm to 4 pm at Sankofa Video, Books & Cafe located at 2714 Georgia Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20001. Suggested age group is 5-9 years old. Click HERE for more information. 

 

Alisa will soon start a postdoctoral fellowship. She earned her Ph.D. last year in Bioengineering from the University of Maryland, College Park. The fellowship is as a Microfluidic Sample Processing Postdoctoral Researcher in the Materials Engineering Division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center located in Livermore, California. Alisa’s research will focus on developing microfluidic techniques to separate biological and environmental samples as part of a larger initiative to identify important biological indicators.

 

 

Anketse graduated in May 2023 from Sweet Briar College, one of the premier women’s colleges in Virginia. Anketse is seeking employment and would welcome any position as she continues to search for work aligned with her major and/or minor. Please contact Dr. Lewis if you have any recommendations for Anketse.

 

Latest & Greatest

Back by popular demand! On Sunday, April 14, 2024, at 2 pm EST, SisterMentors will hold Virtual Wellness Talk Part II with Sandra Amrita McLanahan, M.D., an integrative medicine practitioner with Satchidananda Ashram, Yogaville. She will walk us through healthy living tips, from mindfulness to nutrition and women’s reproductive wellness. We hope to see you there. RSVP here. 

 

Mark your calendars! On Saturday, June 8, 2024, from 11 am to 12 noon in downtown Washington, D.C., SisterMentors will host a convening for current women and alumnae. This is your chance to meet current SisterMentors women and to see peers who you may not have seen in years! Stick around to meet current girls and young women in our program. More details to come.

 

Mark your calendars for our Annual SisterMentors Reunion on Saturday, June 29, 2024. As one of the most anticipated programs of the year, we will bring together our dynamic alumnae network for sisterhood and fellowship.

 

Being a Spelman woman means so much, but, mainly, I would say it means having the confidence to go into spaces that we, as women of African Descent, are not traditionally invited into and not only being outspoken in those spaces but also allowing ourselves to shine!

 

I’m truly enjoying my experience at Spelman so far. It is so amazing to be in an institution that was designed, created, and led by women who look like me. It has been really nice so far. I have made lots of friends who share the same interests as I do. I’m part of a social justice program fellowship. I also volunteer in the local community surrounding Spelman called the West End, which is a lower-income neighborhood. My friends and I have volunteered at a community garden and planted hibiscus and Palestinian plants. It has been really great to help educate people about the conflicts going on in the community and draw connections elsewhere in the world, like what’s happening in Gaza.

 

Since Spelman is a small college, I have been so surprised at all the different social, activist, and civic activities that go on – there is truly something for everyone, and you can always find a space where you feel welcomed and fit in. 

 

The classes I’m really enjoying so far are instructed by Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, a leading Black feminist at The Women’s Center. For many years, Spelman has required a two-semester course called African Diaspora and the World, which takes a gendered approach to assessing the past, present, and future of the global Black experience. It is truly eye-opening, and I believe this course is why Spelmanites are the way they are - so rooted in a sense of self and guided by service to uplift their community. My largest class is a Biology lecture course, which has 50 students. The smallest class I’m taking is Stage Craft and Theatre, which only has 12 students. I really enjoy the small class sizes.  

What type of activism have you done since being on campus? 
I’ve been engaged in a program called Students for Justice in Palestine which has really allowed me to continue my activism and make lots of friends. I am also working on issues of police brutality in Atlanta and protested new construction that would have destroyed valuable forests in the city for condos to be built. 

 

SisterMentors is continuing its series of alumnae interviews on our podcast!  Every alumna we interview talks about significant aspects of her education journey and the impact of SisterMentors on her life.  

 

This month we have two podcasts –-- one from Adrienne Smith and the other from Regina Fuller-White. Check out these two podcasts: 

Quote of the Quarter

“Tremendous amounts of talent are being lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt. This is stupid and wrong, and I want the time to come when we are as blind to sex as we are to color. But that time is not here, and when someone tries to use my sex against me, I delight in being able to turn the tables on him, as I did in my congressional campaign.”

 

Job Postings!

We are hiring!  We are seeking to fill several new positions to further our ongoing sustainability initiatives.

 

 

We are recruiting…

Do you know of any women of color (Black, Latina, Asian, Muslim, Indigenous) working on a doctorate? Would they like to be part of a community of sister scholars helping each other to make progress on earning their degree? Would they also like to be a role model and mentor for a young girl of color? Do they live in the Washington, D.C. area? If so, SisterMentors is for them.

 

Ask interested women to email Dr. Shireen Lewis at director@sistermentors.org.