The fund dovetails with one of the key priorities of Fordham’s recent fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, with its emphasis on equity and inclusion as well as the wellness of every student. Here are five examples of the numerous activities it has made possible:

No. 1: Ignatian Q.

With support from the fund, 10 Fordham students traveled to St. Louis University in April for this annual conference organized by the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities to promote community and spirituality among LGBTQ students. (Fordham hosted Ignatian Q in 2023 with support from the wellbeing fund.) In the words of one Fordham graduate student who attended, Tatum Allen, FCLC ’24, “it offered me a space to feel less alone as a queer person of faith.”

No. 2: Students Together for Acceptance, Respect, and Support (STARS).

Piloted last year by professors and students in the psychology department and the Graduate School of Social Service, this network brings Fordham students together with local high school students seeking to engage with LGBTQ peers, find support, and build community. Two of the high schoolers also took part in a year-long research project on LGBTQ experiences in school and presented their research at the Eastern Psychological Association Conference in Philadelphia.

No. 3: Oral History Project with SAGE Center Bronx.

Last year, undergraduate students in a communications class—titled Photography, Identity, Power—worked with residents of the SAGE center, a community center for LGBTQ seniors, to produce a digital exhibition of their photography that includes an oral history element. Students in an art class, Visual Justice, later met with the seniors and made portrait photographs of them.

No. 4: Queer Prayer Book.

The book Queer Prayer at Fordham was developed in 2023 and distributed at Ignatian Q when it was held at the University. 

No. 5: NYC Interfaith Pilgrimage/Retreat

This daylong retreat at the Lincoln Center campus, held in February, centered on art as a way to explore the intersection between spirituality and queerness. About two dozen students and alumni gathered for morning presentations, toured sites important to the LGBTQ community in Greenwich Village, and reconvened on campus to produce their own art. 

No. 6: Urban Plunge and Global Outreach Scholarships.

With support from the wellbeing fund, LGBTQ students received scholarships to take part in Urban Plunge and Global Outreach, two programs of the Center for Community Engaged Learning.

Sources: Fordham Campus Ministry, Center for Community Engaged Learning 

A new student fan section, the Shirtless Herd, fired up the fans and brought “Rose thrill” to the Rose Hill Gym, in the words of Keith Urgo, who has overseen the men’s team’s resurgence since becoming its head coach in spring 2022.

Because of the New Era Fund and Fordham-wide support, “the culture and outlook around the program have shifted dramatically in the right direction,” said Fordham’s interim athletic director, Charlie Elwood. As the final buzzer sounds for the Cura Personalis campaign, Fordham basketball walks off the court with big wins on the board. Here are five: 

No. 1: Historic Record.

Men’s basketball achieved its highest three-year win total since joining the Atlantic 10 in 1995. The highlight? Going 25-8 in the 2022-2023 season, tying the second-best season total in the team’s history and coming in just win one shy of the famed 26-3 season of 1970-1971.

No. 2: Surging in the Atlantic 10.

The men’s team tied for second in the final A-10 standings in 2022-2023 and reached the semifinals of the A-10 Tournament for just the second time.  

No. 3: New Women’s Coach Scores Big.

In the 2023-2024 season, her first season as head coach of the women’s team, Bridgette Mitchell led the Rams to the most wins by a first-year Fordham women’s basketball coach since 1993-1994.

No. 4: Ram Spirit Revived.

In a sign of growing enthusiasm for Fordham basketball, ticket sales for the men’s team games grew 113% from the 2022-2023 season to the 2023-2024 season.

No. 5: A Bigger Public Profile.

Fordham has been covered on CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC, and PIX11, and in the New York Post and Newsday, because of the men’s team’s performance. The Feb. 23, 2024, home men’s basketball game against Duquesne marked the Rams’ first appearance on ESPN2 since 2008.

“This program has shown me how important it is to be organized because it’s so massive,” said Cintron, a Bronx native majoring in finance.

That program is the Gabelli School’s Corporate Communications High School Pipeline Program, begun six years ago to help students from underrepresented groups enroll at Fordham or comparable schools, thereby increasing their presence in university classrooms and in the world of business.

Scholarship Support

A key part of the program is scholarships. As a student co-leader, Cintron receives the Gabelli Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Scholarship, established in 2021 to support students who, like Cintron, took part in the program as high schoolers and serve the program in administrative roles as students at Fordham.

It has proved to be a critical piece of his financial aid, said Cintron. “The scholarship has lifted a huge financial burden and created a sense of security for my mom and me,” he said. “I have so many opportunities and resources at Fordham, and to have lost those resources because I can’t pay tuition would be heartbreaking.”

The pipeline program prepares students for business school through mentoring, corporate site visits, a class on the Fordham campus, and a business class taught in the high schools by Gabelli School students to prepare the high schoolers for a year-end pitch proposal competition.

Over the past six years, the program has served approximately 300 high schoolers, and nearly 100 Gabelli School students have served in the program. About two dozen of the high schoolers are either enrolled at Fordham or have recently graduated, said Clarence E. Ball III, former director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Gabelli School, who founded and built the pipeline program.

Dramatic Growth

The program has grown dramatically, he said—since beginning in 2018 with 12 students at Cardinal Hayes High School, Cintron’s alma mater, it has expanded to six Catholic high schools in the Bronx and East Harlem. Because of that growth, Cintron was extra busy last year managing other Fordham students who joined the program as mentors and classroom instructors.

Thanks to a spate of alumni donations in recent years, the Gabelli School will soon be able to award scholarship funds to more students who, like Cintron, play leadership roles in the pipeline program, Ball said.

Leadership Skills and an Internship at Citi

As he looks ahead to his career, Cintron is grateful that being able to attend Fordham helped him land an internship at Citi this past summer. And his experience at the head of a high school classroom should come in handy as well.

“Leading a classroom is very transferable to leading any group, and just understanding how to get through to people, how to get the group back on track,” he said.

Then came the welcome news that ended the uncertainty: her costs would be covered by gifts from members of the Fordham University President’s Council, a group of accomplished alumni who mentor students and work to advance the University. 

“I literally started tearing up,” said Mosquea, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill. “I told my mom, and she was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe it. It was just so helpful, and I was so grateful for it.”

Mosquea is one of dozens of students to benefit in recent years from President’s Council members’ gifts to make Global Outreach accessible to students in Fordham’s Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP), who have high financial need. 

A Social Justice Focus

Council member Anne Williams-Isom, FCLC ’86,  made the first such gift in 2018 after learning that the HEOP leadership wanted to make Global Outreach an integral part of the HEOP experience. Since then, member gifts have helped dozens of students in the program, including 48 students who took part in Global Outreach this year and last year alone. 

Mosquea participated twice in Global Outreach, which runs week-long projects in the U.S. and abroad—in partnership with other organizations—that are centered on social justice and community engagement. 

‘My People’: A Personal Connection

For the first project, in spring 2023, she traveled to the Dominican Republic, where her family is from; learned about environmental conservation efforts firsthand; and met up for the first time in 14 years with her father, who lives there. “It was just an incredible experience to not only learn about the land, but also my people as well,” she said. 

Last spring she served as a student leader for a project in Puerto Rico, where she and the other students helped efforts to convert an old U.S. military base into a community center that promotes environmental education and ecotourism. 

Both projects fueled her desire to work in environmental education and sustainability consulting. “Global outreach is so unique, it’s so beautiful,” she said. “It’s really enriched my life in so many different ways.”

Deepening Spirituality

Another student in HEOP, Fordham College at Rose Hill junior Miguel Picazo, also received support for traveling to Mexico with Global Outreach in 2023, where he learned about sustainable farming, and then for traveling to London this year. Through a partnership with the Jesuit Refugee Service, students visited migrant-heavy areas of East London and South London, attended Mass at Jesuit churches, and volunteered in their food pantries, among other service work. 

The London Masses, with their diversity of celebrants, reinforced some of the impressions gleaned on his Mexico excursion, when he encountered migrants from diverse countries who were sustained by their spirituality.

“This spirituality sense makes you feel more human—we’re not all different, we all want the same thing,” Picazo said, “a better life, better education, a better future for our families and kids. And experiences like that stick with you for a while.” 

She had spent a year as a hospice volunteer, learning to provide support to seriously ill patients and their families. She started working with four patients per week, but soon found herself working with 10 per week because the work was so rewarding. 

“It’s a privilege to be able to see people in that time and provide them support,” she said. “It was fulfilling in that sometimes you could see that, even if just a little bit, you were making this very difficult process a little easier for some people.”

A Scholarship in Memory of Meredith Barnhart 

Pursuing her Master of Social Work at the Graduate School of Social Service, Smith is learning in depth about helping people work through the myriad issues and questions that come with serious illness, such as end-of-life planning. As a recipient of the graduate school’s Palliative Care Fellowship, she takes part in specialized seminars and workshops, and she interns in palliative care at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. 

She’s received crucial help from fellowships and scholarships—including the Meredith J. Barnhart, Ph.D., GSS ’20, Memorial Endowed Scholarship, named for a woman who earned her doctorate at the Graduate School of Social Service.

Barnhart’s family established the scholarship after she passed away suddenly at her home in 2020, just four months after she had earned her doctorate. The scholarship is designated for someone who has an interest in palliative and end-of-life care or oncology. 

“The Barnhart scholarship is really helpful—I’m paying for my graduate degree myself, so it made it more financially accessible,” Smith said. She has also received the graduate school’s Kathy and Brian MacLean Scholarship in Palliative Care.

After receiving the Barnhart scholarship, Smith met with Barnhart’s fiancée, Jeffrey Knapp, and attended a presentation on Barnhart’s doctoral work, focused on serving families in which cancer strikes a parent and a child at the same time. Smith said she’s honored to carry on Barnhart’s legacy and her passion for “serving people in this really difficult time in their lives and their loved ones’ lives.”

Discovering Social Work

Smith first got the idea of being a social worker around the time of her graduation from Barnard College in 2022. When she learned that her grandmother needed more health care support, she researched government programs that might help her, just as a social worker might connect a patient with services. She found she liked the work. And then there was the memory of her late grandfather and the social workers who helped him during hospice care. 

“Thinking about how there were people who were there, to make sure he was comfortable and helping, made me feel better,” she said.

During her time as a hospice volunteer, at Constellation Health Services in her home state of Connecticut, “I was able to sort of do for other people what had been done for me,” she said.

Being with people at the end of life means a lot to her. Sometimes, she said, “you could just really see some of the patients didn’t have anyone else.” 

“I’m still not over it, I don’t think,” said Biggs, who has contributed to six other publications as a coauthor.

Targeting Tumors

The publication is also good news in the fight against cancer: It describes a possible new method for treating tumors without the side effects that sometimes accompany chemotherapy. Biggs and her coauthors—Fordham students and alumni and her research mentor, biochemistry professor Ipsita Banerjee, Ph.D.—show how peptides derived from living organisms can be designed to precisely target tumors with chemotherapy drugs. It’s an alternative to a less precise method involving a barrage of synthetic peptides, which can cause damage to cells surrounding the tumor.

After developing a series of naturally derived peptides, the team tested them using computer models and by applying them to tumors grown in their lab. The next step would be testing their efficacy in animals. Biggs and her team members have shared the research at national and regional conferences while working toward publication, “and to have it published is really the culmination of all of that hard work,” she said. 

But the research might still be far back in the pipeline, working its way toward publication, if not for a funding award Biggs received last year. 

A Gift Toward Science Education at Fordham

In fall 2021, Fordham received a $250,000 gift from the Blavatnik Family Foundation, established by Ukrainian-born industrialist Len Blavatnik to support the arts, culture, and the sciences at institutions around the globe. The gift in support of STEM education at Fordham included funds for student research fellowships, one of which was awarded to Biggs in fall 2023.

It proved a crucial accelerant to her research, making “a world of a difference,” she said. 

“I can’t really overstate the level of impact that it had,” she said. “I was able to really devote a lot more time and energy to my research as a direct result of having that funding. It really let me have that one-track-mindedness that I think research requires sometimes.”

Without the fellowship, she would have had to devote more time to paid work, and the research “likely would’ve taken a lot longer,” Biggs said. “It may not have reached the publication stage as quickly as it did.” The fellowship also supported her work on other projects for which she’s now a published coauthor, all of which involved peptides that target different types of tumors, she noted.

Today she’s applying to doctoral programs, possibly with a focus on plant biochemistry. “I’m enormously grateful” for the Blavatnik award, she said, and also expressed gratitude for other financial help that Fordham has provided her. “I wouldn’t have gotten to this point,” she said, “without that robust support.”

Thanks to a new grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the library will be able to keep adding to the COVID-19 archive that it began assembling in April 2020. The archive is currently made up of items that are reminiscent of the many stages of the pandemic, including “Do Not Sit Here” signage and floor arrow decals, Fordham’s COVID-19 “Five Things” e-mails, photos of testing tents, and press coverage from the Observer newspaper. LoSchiavo said there are currently roughly 400 items in the collection, and she’d like to get to 1,000 by the end of the year. 

It’s an ambitious goal, but LoSchiavo is optimistic it can be done. The federal grant of $30,299 will allow the library to purchase heavy-duty, high-end scanners to catalogue printed material and camera equipment to conduct interviews with as many members of the community as possible. From the shutdown in March 2020, to the transition to remote learning, to connecting with colleagues from home, to deep cleaning building interiors, LoSchiavo wants to hear from the people who lived it. 

“I really thought this was a way to show future historians how lives changed under the duress of a pandemic. If enough schools do this, it’ll be a way to compare and contrast how public institutions handled it, how private institutions handled it, and how as a large Catholic, Jesuit university in the middle of New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, it affected our students’ lives,” she said.

The hope is to get everyone on record, from vice presidents and deans to administrators, faculty, and staff. LoSchiavo said the library is still working on a formal way to reach out to everyone in the University community and let them sign up for interviews; she plans to share updates via the library’s blog. Interviews will be conducted in person, over the phone, through Zoom, and via e-mail.

She’s especially interested in highlighting the can-do spirit that the community embraced during the pandemic.

“We shut the doors at the library on Friday, March 20, but we never stopped. On March 21, we were still at it, virtually. I had teams of people who just knew what they had to do, and they just kept getting it done,” she said, noting that this was a pattern that was repeated across the University.

“I look at what the facilities people had to do in the spring and summer to get us open for August 2020. The maintenance people were certainly in this building every day and night, cleaning. These are people we want to talk to.”

Above all, LoSchiavo is cognizant that as months and the years pass, people tend to forget how quickly things changed. But hopefully, everyone will be able to look back at that time with pride.

“When we got back, I can’t tell you how many people said, ‘Well, no one was laid off,’” she said.

“For the most part, I felt like it was a really a spirit of optimism, and hopefully that’s what will come through.”

Fordham’s donors, alumni, and friends gathered on Nov. 8 not only to honor the Founder’s Scholars—Fordham students whose scholarships are supported by the event—but also to pay tribute to the evening’s honorees: Emanuel “Manny” Chirico, GABELLI ’79, PAR; his wife Joanne M. Chirico, PAR; and Joseph H. Moglia, FCRH ’71.

“I would like to thank all of you for supporting this long-overdue annual celebration of our beloved University,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham.

Father McShane noted that there was “eager longing” for this Founder’s Dinner, in part because of the last 18 months but also because it kicked off the new campaign for the student experience.

“We also celebrate the public launch of the Cura Personalis campaign, a campaign that will make it possible for the University to continue to redeem the promise that it has made to its students for 180 years: the promise to provide them with the kind of personal, empowering, and transformative care that has always been the hallmark of a Fordham education,” he said. “I am happy to tell you that, thanks to the generosity that you have already shown, we have already raised $170 million toward the $350 million goal. And for that, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

All attendees were required to be fully vaccinated and wear a mask when entering The Glasshouse, which featured sweeping views overlooking the Hudson, outdoor terraces, and an airy ballroom lit by modern chandeliers.

Supporting the Students

David Ushery, the anchor for NBC 4 New York’s 4 p.m. and 11 p.m. weekday newscasts, emceed the Founder’s Dinner, which began in 2002 and has raised more than $42 million to support the Fordham Founder’s Scholarship Fund. Ushery received an honorary doctorate from Fordham in 2019, and his wife, Isabel Rivera-Ushery, is a 1990 graduate of Fordham College at Rose Hill.

“You have supported 130 Fordham students through this program—students who would not have benefited from our fine Jesuit education without your support and generosity,” Ushery told the more than 1,000 attendees. “You have impacted the scholars’ career paths as they are ‘setting the world on fire.’ Your impact on them guides their impact on others.”

The New Campaign

That impact will be taken to new levels through the University’s new fundraising campaign. Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, which aims to enhance the student experience as well as prepare students to work for social justice and be leaders in today’s world. The campaign pledges to renew Fordham’s commitment to care for the whole student as a unique, complex person and to nurture their gifts accordingly.

The campaign features four main pillars: access and affordability, academic excellence, student wellness and success, and athletics—with diversity, equity, and inclusion goals embedded in each of them. The night also featured the debut of a new campaign video that highlights the student experience at Fordham.

Founder’s Scholar Sydney Veazie, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, said that the Jesuit value of cura personalis, or care of the whole person, has been an essential part of her experience at Fordham. At Fordham, Veazie said, the Latin noun cura is transformed into a verb—something that students, faculty, and staff put into action.

“[Cura Personalis] becomes an active call, a mission statement, and a defining feature of this University to care for the students who call it home—to attend to us and to our needs,” said Veazie, a double major in international political economy and classical civilization. “Each student can expect personalized care, personalized attention during our time here.”

Veazie, a Fordham tour guide who currently volunteers as a team lead for the Fordham chapter of Consult Your Community and at Belmont High School, said she plans to take the lessons of cura personalis that she learned at Fordham and carry them forward.

“I’ll be going to law school in the fall of 2022, and I eventually hope to work in government and politics and infuse cura into everything I do,” she said.

Veazie said that none of this would have been possible for her or her fellow Founder’s Scholars without the support of those in attendance.

“I cannot stress enough how important this kind of investment is,” she said. “Fordham’s emphasis on cura personalis yields a student body, a community, that itches to pay forward the lessons, the care, and the holistic development we’ve received during our time here.”

Thomas Reuter, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill and United Student Government president, served as student MC for the second half of the program. He said the campaign will help ensure that all students feel at home at Fordham and that they’re able to take advantage of the opportunities the University offers.

“This campaign will invest in what we love most about Fordham…its student-centered Jesuit, Catholic education that nurtures the whole person,” he said. “This campaign will renew and enhance our distinctive educational experience that has transformed lives since Fordham was founded in 1841.”

Honorees

Father McShane expressed gratitude to the evening’s honorees for their efforts to support Fordham’s mission and its students.

“You are extraordinary … you are generous with your time, treasure, and talent … and you stand as exemplars of the renewal of the University in its identity and mission,” he said.

Manny Chirico, a titan of the fashion industry, is the longtime chairman and CEO of PVH Corp., the world’s second-largest apparel company; he plans to retire next month. Chirico served as the company’s CEO beginning in 2006 and as its board chairman since 2007. He currently serves on the boards of Montefiore Medical Center and Save the Children, while Joanne serves as the vice president of the Parish Council at Immaculate Conception Church in Tuckahoe, New York, and is on the board of Montfort Academy.

Manny, who is also a Fordham trustee, recalled that when he was a senior at Fordham, he took a philosophy class with a Jesuit professor who quoted St. Ignatius Loyola: “Go forth and set the world on fire.”

“I really like that quote, it sounded like something Vince Lombardi would say just before he sent his team out to play in the Super Bowl,” Chirico said. “I had no idea what it meant, but I wrote it down in my notebook.”

Chirico said that he asked the priest what this quote actually meant.

“In typical Jesuit fashion, he said to me, ‘Young man, that’s what you need to figure out,’” he said. “So for the last 40 years, I’ve been trying to figure out what it means to go forth and set the world on fire—I’m still working on it—but I do realize that there is no formula and no set answer. It’s a challenge to make a difference in the small things we do every day.”

Joe Moglia has combined his love of finance and football throughout his life, working as a championship-winning defensive coordinator at Dartmouth before joining the MBA training program at Merrill Lynch and eventually becoming CEO and chairman of TD Ameritrade, a post he held for more than 24 years, before returning to football as the head coach at Coastal Carolina University. Moglia currently serves as the chair of athletics at Coastal Carolina and board chairman of Fundamental Global Investors and Capital Wealth Advisors.

When he was a senior at Fordham, Moglia took a job coaching at Archmere Academy in Claymont, Delaware, and said that he wanted to provide his players with something more than just a desire to win.

“How do you lay the foundation upon which those boys become men?” he said.

“We created a philosophy that said, ‘A real man, a real woman, a real leader, stands on their own two feet, takes responsibility for themselves, always treats others with dignity and respect, and deals with the consequences of their actions,” he said.

Moglia said that this mindset and philosophy came from Fordham.

“This is a university for others, that loves others, so for me, for whatever I may have accomplished in my life, at the end of the day I’m so incredibly proud to be part of Fordham … and hopefully as I go forward, I continue to make Fordham proud,” he said.

The Chiricos and Moglia were originally supposed to be honored in 2020, but that Founder’s Dinner was canceled due to the pandemic. They were also recognized earlier this year at a virtual toast for scholars and honorees.

The night also featured several performances: Tyler Tagliaferro, a 2017 graduate of the Fordham College at Lincoln Center, played the bagpipes as guests walked in; the Young People’s Chorus of New York City performed; Jesira Rodriguez, a Fordham College at Lincoln Center senior and a Founder’s Scholar, sang the national anthem; and the Fordham Ramblers closed the evening with an a cappella rendition of “The Ram,” Fordham’s fight song.

Father McShane called on those in attendance to honor the members of the Fordham community who preceded them by investing in and supporting current students.

“You were formed by and now possess the intangibles that make for Fordham’s greatness, and that distinguish Fordham from other universities,” he said. “You are men and women for others. You are men and women of character, grit, determination, integrity, expansiveness of heart, and restlessness of spirit. And so, I turn to you to enable Fordham to make the kind of rich transformative experience that you received here available to your younger brothers and sisters.”

Under the theme “Philanthropy | Empowerment | Change,” the morning’s keynote speaker, financial journalist and author Stacey Tisdale, MC ’88, spoke specifically about how priorities have been upended by workers during the pandemic, with women leading the charge for better work/life balance. Indeed, as the day progressed, panelists spoke of a balance struck by necessity, often on Zoom in the kitchen with the kids across the table.

“Women are heads of households, even though we’re certainly not treated that way,” said Tisdale, speaking to hundreds of virtual attendees. “Women participate in the provider side of the financial equation much more than they used to, but the belief that it is a man’s job to provide for his family and it is a woman’s job to take care of her family is still common.”

Tisdale noted women control over 60% of all the personal wealth in the U.S. and a majority of the personal wealth in the world. Yet, only 22% of women rate themselves as very well prepared for financial decision-making.

“There’s a confidence gap here we’re talking about,” she said. “Women were not always taught to be empowered in our financial decisions. I’m challenging you to go a little bit deeper. Where do you want things to change?”

She challenged viewers to examine self-perceptions.

“You are already perfect. If you don’t believe this, it is due to a flaw of your understanding,” she said. “Get rid of this understanding and you will become rich. Know that you’re born with the ability to accomplish things. The numbers stuff is the easy part.”

Fordham College at Lincoln Center junior Jayda Jones told attendees how scholarships
made her journey at the University possible.

Being Vulnerable and Promoting Empathy

In a panel following Tisdale’s talk titled “Compassionate and Collaborative Leadership in the Workplace,” Fordham Law adjunct professor Katherine Hughes, LAW ’08, GSAS ’08, said that having her kids doing schoolwork across the table while she met colleagues on Zoom changed her perception of leadership.

“I think that part of being a leader now is to show those pieces of myself and show my vulnerability,” she said, adding that wearing her heart on her sleeve has made her an empathetic leader.

“You forget that you’re dealing with people sometimes, one of the silver linings [of quarantine was that]I was forced to see people as people,” she said.

Eventually, however, the kitchen became far too small. She now works from her basement to create a perceived separation from home life with an up-the-stairs commute for dinner.

Christina Luconi, PAR, chief people officer at the cybersecurity firm RAPID7, concurred that creating personal space remains key for those working virtually. She breaks up her day with a long run to put herself in the “right headspace for the day.” Fellow panelist Peggy Smyth, FCRH ’85, said that she too needs long walks to as a break from being “a short-order cook” for her athlete sons and being the U.S. senior advisor on global infrastructure for QIC, the Australian investment firm.

Marjorie Cadogan, FCRH ’82, LAW ’85, said that while she agreed that creating space between work and life in the virtual workplace is important, she said virtual meetings have broken down a perceived wall. 

“One of the great things for me was to be able to see work as a part of life,” she said. “Work is a piece of a whole and you really do have to understand that you have to work with the whole [of life]to get the best of the piece.”

In the chat, she elaborated.

“You have to talk to people about their own relationships, hobbies, activities that are important to them and hopefully be able to share those important priorities,” she wrote. “The communication issue is a big one, because people communicate in different ways. Sometimes you just have to tell people what you need and what style of communication you respond to best to deliver your best work or response.”

Getting Real: Leadership Amidst Pain

In an afternoon panel titled “Compassionate and Collaborative Leadership in the Community,” Kimberly Hardy-Watson, FCRH ’84, president and CEO of Graham Windham, a nonprofit working with families in the city’s underserved communities, brought the brutal realities of the pandemic home.

“I have had to say goodbye to 52 people in this time frame and I’m not an anomaly. Whole communities were impacted by the loss and I’m still finding out who we lost,” she said, adding that the deaths have made everyone reframe priorities.

“I’m pleased at the pushback, [workers]are voting with their feet and saying that work life/harmony is important,” she said, noting that many workers are looking for new jobs in what was referred to as the Great Resignation.

Yet, Hardy-Watson admitted that even she was reticent to reveal everything she was going through during the pandemic. She contracted the virus herself, and with so many people depending on her, she coped with it in silence. Eventually, she stepped back and acknowledged what was going on.

“There’s a level of authenticity that has happened in this time that I haven’t seen in a while and there are huge opportunities in that,” she said.

Jane Abitanta, GABELLI ’85, ’86, concurred.

“I feel that the pandemic has cracked hearts open, she said, adding that communication had been more authentic and honest. “But not everyone feels ready to move forward. There’s that idea that we want to create normalcy and that’s not going to be easy for everyone to do—and I’m not even sure that’s a good idea.”

In her role as founder and CEO at the communications firm Perceval Associates, Abitanta recently spoke to a high-ranking real estate investor who said his firm was underwriting a financial plan that forecasts a pandemic every five years.

“We’re in a chronic crisis mode and have to get even more creative in virtual communication and in person, but not everyone is ready for that,” she said.

Naelys Luna, GSS ’01, ’05, founding dean of the College of Social Work and Criminal Justice at Florida Atlantic University, agreed that even leaders need to acknowledge that they’re experiencing trauma.

“[T]he process of becoming a leader is much the same as becoming integrated human beings; many times we spend a tremendous effort of putting out fires and when you put that together with the chronic stress [of the pandemic]—and certainly we all feel it—it puts you in a reactive mode and that alters the way you see things.”

Giving as Your Authentic Self

Joan Garry, FCRH ’79, former executive director of the gay rights organization GLAAD, who now runs her own nonprofit consulting firm, said that the authenticity one sees emerging in the workforce has permeated all sectors of the economy, including nonprofits and philanthropy. But it’s not a new concept, she said. It’s one she learned at Fordham.

“As our Jesuit values remind us, we are women for others,” she said. “So, take a look in the mirror, you’re staring at an activist.”

She noted that women make 90% of the philanthropic decisions for the nation’s families. Indeed, many of the attendees said they already belonged to one of Fordham’s Giving Circles, which allow donors to give regularly—starting at $100 a year—to any area of the University, from STEM funds, to a mission-focused fund called Living the Mission, to particular colleges or graduate schools.

Indeed, in her own family, she and her wife spearheaded a giving circle among her children and their cousins. The kids decided to give to a wildlife foundation. When the foundation sent a stuffed polar bear to the house as a thank you gift for giving, her son was furious. He wanted all the money they gave didn’t go to real animals.

She referred to the get-something-for-giving scenario as the “Girl Scout Cookie Syndrome.”

“It’s all about the thin mints,” she said. “Even the well-informed people who know about the great work of Girl Scouts develop some form of sugar amnesia.”

She equated the so-called cookie syndrome to inauthentic special events pegged to bold-named celebrities rather than the cause, leading some attendees to have no idea what they’re supporting. She pointedly excluded the Fordham Founder’s Dinner, which she said brings the mission of the evening to life.

“This pandemic has changed all of us in ways we do not yet understand,” she said. “We need to look at everything with intention to make sure our life has meaning and purpose.”

And that includes philanthropy, she said.

“We have to give with an understating of our privilege and with a sense of joy.”

“It is increasingly obvious that the STEM disciplines now share the same prominence as the humanities as a lingua franca of educated citizens,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “One cannot navigate the modern world without a basic understanding of STEM, and the Blavatnik Family Foundation gift helps ensure Fordham students are equipped to lead their fields in the decades ahead.”

The foundation was established by Len Blavatnik, the Ukrainian-born, American-educated industrialist who holds dual citizenship in the United States and the United Kingdom. Through the foundation, Blavatnik has given more than $800 million to institutions around the globe.

“Fordham’s next 181 years will be shaped largely by its STEM programs,” Roger A. Milici, Jr., PAR ’22, vice president of Development and University Relations, said of the University, which will celebrate its 181st anniversary in June. “This inaugural investment by a global philanthropist, generously made through the Blavatnik Family Foundation, is both inspiring and acknowledgment of how philanthropy creates impact. This gift will advance our ability to make a rigorous Jesuit education in the capital of the world more accessible and richer in this important field of discovery and innovation.”

Support for Students Through Scholarship 

The foundation has allocated $200,000 of the gift to fund the Blavatnik Scholarship for Excellence in STEM, which will provide financial aid resources to high-achieving Fordham undergraduates majoring in STEM fields.

“Scholarships like this one play an important role in enabling diverse and talented students to come to Fordham to study with our outstanding STEM faculty who are doing groundbreaking work in areas like integrative neuroscience, environmental science, computer science, and more—work that is making a difference in the city, the nation, and the planet,” said Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

Promoting Research

The remaining $50,000 will fund the Len Blavatnik STEM Research Fellowship, which will support student research projects in STEM areas. The fellowship money will be allocated by the deans at Fordham College at Lincoln Center and Fordham College at Rose Hill.

Fordham College at Rose Hill Dean Maura Mast, Ph.D., said the fellowship will provide needed support for student researchers.

“Fordham undergraduates consistently publish with faculty, present at conferences, and are true partners in the creation of new knowledge,” said Mast, who teaches a STEM course based on a recently released second edition of a textbook she co-authored, titled “Common Sense Mathematics.”.

Mast noted that Fordham is one of the top institutions to induct students into Sigma Xi, the scientific honor society; 72 Fordham students joined this past spring. She said she has found that students appreciate that their research may lead to more questions than answers.

“They see STEM as a place of discovery, creativity, complexity, and problem solving,” she said. “Doing science helps them understand the world and make it better.”

She added that some students set out to address the big problems of the day, such as diseases like COVID-19, HPV, and cancer, as well as environmental issues such as climate change, soil erosion, pollution, and water quality. Yet others are drawn to small-scale challenges, like developing ways to use nanowires in common applications such as glucose sensors and fuel cells, studying the relationship between genetic mutations and mitochondrial diseases, and researching particle physics, she said.

“Thanks to donor support that provides funding for research grants, lab supplies, and conference participation, undergraduate research has become a signature program in both [of Fordham’s undergraduate liberal arts]colleges,” she said.

“I think one of the reasons you’re here is to make the world a better place than the one you arrived to,” she said. “And philanthropy is an incredibly powerful tool for that. I want the women at the Women’s Summit to own that. I want them to see that. I want them to evangelize that.” (Update: Watch Garry’s address at the Summit.)

Making the World a Better Place

For Garry, the desire to make the world a better place stems, in part, from her personal life. In the early 1990s, two decades before the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage, she and her partner, Eileen, were discussing the next steps for their family.

“I believed really deeply that if we were going to have a family that it was incumbent upon us to do what we could to make the world as safe as possible for them,” she said.

They became plaintiffs in a precedent-setting case in New Jersey in 1993, and Garry eventually became the first woman in the state to legally adopt her partner’s biological children.

“It was a huge ‘aha moment’ for me, recognizing, cheesy though it may sound, that one person can really make a difference,” she said on an episode of the Fordham Footsteps podcast last summer. “And it was huge news,” she added. “The story of our family was educating people about members of the LGBT community in a very different kind of way. In the early 1990s, gay families were not common at all, and I realized that the media had this incredible power and responsibility to tell these stories and really shape how the LGBT community was perceived and understood.”

At the time, Garry was an executive at Showtime Networks, but her family’s victory in court inspired her to take her career in a different direction a few years later. In 1997, she was named executive director of GLAAD, a national nonprofit organization that aims to “rewrite the script for LGBTQ acceptance” and tackle “tough issues to shape the narrative and provoke dialogue that leads to cultural change.”

“Because GLAAD focused on the media as an institution where we could change hearts and minds, the bridge from corporate media to the nonprofit sector was a no-brainer for me,” Garry said.

Garry said that when she started at GLAAD, there were “precious few images at all” of LGBTQ people in the media, and when they were featured, the depictions were usually negative. She built partnerships with media executives to change that, working with the producers of Survivor to help get a gay man on the popular TV show in 2000 and successfully lobbying The New York Times to feature gay and lesbian couples in its “Vows” section.

“We are part of the fabric of society,” she said. “The object of the work was to ensure that the media representation reflected the diversity of our society that included LGBTQ members.”

Lessons Learned

Garry said her work at GLAAD was influenced by her previous jobs, particularly at MTV, where she began her career soon after graduating from Fordham College at Rose Hill with a degree in philosophy and communications.

At MTV, Garry learned the “dynamics, energy, and the urgency of a startup,” which became valuable to her as she transitioned to leading GLAAD.

“Running a nonprofit organization, they have a very similar energy [to a startup]—moving quickly, often too quickly, under-resourced,” she said. “The other piece that corporate America provided me was an understanding that numbers tell a story.”

And even before MTV, while still a student at Fordham, Garry said she learned about the value of having a mentor.

She got her start at MTV, several months before the network launched in 1981, thanks in part to her mentor James N. Loughran, S.J., FCRH ’64, GSAS ’75, a Fordham philosophy professor who later served as dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill. Father Loughran encouraged her to reach out to a Fordham graduate who was looking to build a team for a new project at Warner Communications.

“All I know is that one moment I was unemployed, and the next moment I was sharing an office with someone and looking at the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, and feeling like I had won the lottery,” she said with a laugh. “Little did I know that we were creating the business plan for what would become MTV.”

The ‘Accidental’ Consultant

All of those lessons helped prepare Garry for another career transition—starting her own consulting firm for nonprofits.

After working at GLAAD for eight years, Garry decided to focus more on helping raise her three children, who were in middle and high school at the time.

“We believe that older kids need you even more than younger kids,” she said with a laugh. “And so I went home to be on the ground when they got home from school.”

She began to take on some jobs as a way to “maintain my sanity,” Garry said, adding that she became an “accidental” consultant. In 2012, she launched a website to share tips, advice, insights, and lessons she learned from her time in the corporate and nonprofit worlds. The site “took off,” she said, and eventually led to a full-time consulting business and a book, Joan Garry’s Guide to Nonprofit Leadership: Because the World Is Counting on You (Wiley, 2017).

Garry said that she found that many nonprofit leaders don’t have advocates and supporters for their work, which is why she also launched the Nonprofit Leadership Lab to help provide support, networking, and professional development to leaders of nonprofits.

“These jobs—whether you’re running a food pantry or whether you’re researching the cure for a disease or you’re advocating for the Latinx community—these are hard jobs,” she said. “They’re really hard to get right and far too often these leaders do not have champions.”

Inviting People In

Garry said that one of the pieces of advice she plans to give those who attend the Summit, and one she often shares with nonprofit leaders, is to invite people in to be a part of their causes and work.

“It makes people feel good to give money to causes they care about—it is an invitation, an invitation to get closer to those things that drive meaning and purpose in your life,” she said. “And why wouldn’t you invite people to do that? They can always say no. But I’d like to be invited. And so I have grown to understand through all of the work that I have done raising money, that it is  [about]  offering someone the opportunity to bring meaning and purpose into their lives in a different way.”

In particular, Garry said that she wants to invite women to use philanthropy to support the causes they care about.

“Women have not been socialized in the same way as men to be philanthropic; they have had fewer opportunities,” she said. “And I would like them to leave feeling inspired to be engaged in philanthropy in whatever way it makes sense for them.”

Watch the Fifth Annual Fordham Women’s Summit. Garry’s keynote address begins at 3:44:20.