Dear friends,
I am writing to share some exciting changes to the structure of our alumni and development office. Starting November 1, 2021, Dawn Faucher will begin a new role as the SSW Director of Development allowing us to parse the strategic visioning and responsibilities of an alumni relations office under its own dedicated leadership. In her new role, Dawn will continue her development work for SSW and is interested in focusing more fully on developing new SSW student scholarships.
We are so pleased that alumni support of SSW has allowed us to make this change. Over the past 9 years that Dawn has held responsibilities over both development and alumni relations, we have grown so much. Under Dawn’s leadership we have been able to increase our student financial aid substantially because of her development efforts. Last year, for example, we received over $1M in contributions to the SSW for the first time in the School’s history which was used to directly benefit our students in what was a particularly challenging financial year for so many. With Dawn’s vision, we have also provided more opportunities for alumni networking and connection. Working with our Professional Education office, Dawn has co-hosted new programs and offerings for our alumni including the recent webinar on starting a private practice and the webinar on transitioning to telehealth early in the pandemic.
Thanks to the success of these efforts we are in a position to grow our resources to better serve our alumni. We want to create a position that will be exclusively responsible for the strategic visioning of our alumni engagement program. This is an exciting moment for us and I am deeply appreciative and grateful for all that Dawn has done to get us to this point.
We will launch a search for our new director of alumni engagement later this fall. We are particularly interested in having one of our own alumni in this position and we encourage any SSW alumni who are interested in applying to do so.
Thank you all for your support of SSW. I am so pleased with how we have grown as a School.
Sincerely,
Marianne R.M. Yoshioka, MBA, Ph.D., LCSW
Dean and Elizabeth Marting Treuhaft Professor
Co-editor, Smith College Studies in Social Work
Smith College School for Social Work
