Alumnae Awards

Kristin Kagetsu '08, a social entrepreneur and engineer based in India, tackles "period poverty," a critical issue impacting women's health and economic development. She co-founded Saathi, a UN-recognized social enterprise offering eco-friendly menstrual hygiene solutions. Her innovative approaches to manufacturing, business, and education drive both local growth and global change. Saathi has earned accolades from Time, Fast Company, the UN Environment Program, Vogue, MIT Museum, and others for its social impact and sustainability. Kristin herself is an MIT DLab ScaleUps Fellow, Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia honoree, and Cartier Women’s Initiative Finalist. A renowned speaker, she has addressed platforms like the World Economic Forum, UNDP, and was the 2022 Waislitz Global Citizen Award winner.

Jill Klein Grant '73 began her career at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where she developed expertise in environmental law. Driven to address gaps in legal advocacy for Native American Tribes, she moved to Albuquerque, NM, dedicating over 30 years to helping Tribes protect their natural and cultural resources. Jill played a key role in establishing Tribal Environmental Protection Agencies and drafting tribal environmental laws to safeguard sovereignty and well-being.

For the Navajo Nation, she helped create a tribal NEPA and a Navajo EPA to address issues like water access and pollution from over 500 uranium mines. Jill also collaborated with the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes on environmental waste management near a Superfund site. In 2013, she founded Jill Grant & Associates, championing environmental justice.

As the director of transportation at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Amanda Eaken manages a team driving ambitious climate action in 25 US cities to create transportation choices such as walking, biking and public transit. Her work focuses on “decarbonizing” transportation, and over the last three years, Amanda’s work has become twofold: advancing policies that not only tackle climate change but also facilitate an equitable, socially just recovery from the global pandemic. The Climate Challenge teams prioritized actions for lasting fair and sustainable change; they shifted influential systems to become more deliberate about inclusivity of all communities and helped promote the perspectives of underserved and underinvested populations through advocacy and equitable policy making.

Starting in 2010, Molly Rauch ‘90 was involved with Moms Clean Air Force (MCAF), serving until 2022 as public health policy director. MCAF is a grassroots advocacy group affiliated with the Environmental Defense Fund, with local chapters in 15 states and over one million members. MCAF works in collaboration with other climate change and clean air groups to inform the public about the health impacts of pollution and how to fight for clean air. During her 12 years with MCAF, Molly helped shape the growth of the program, building relationships, alliances and partnerships with public health organizations to develop and implement strategies to influence regulatory and policy decisions.

For over 40 years, Maggy Cullman’s dedication to those in need of help—women prisoners, new immigrants, community college students, the elderly, and people of many faith communities—has been steady, generous, passionate and unassuming. Maggy has been called “a priceless gift to the community.”

Maggy received her BA from Manhattanville College and an MA in English from the University of Iowa. She is consistently engaged in multiple volunteer activities, using her expertise in education and administration to serve the needs of prisoners, immigrants, the elderly and interfaith communities. Maggy also devoted decades to the many social justice activities of the Episcopal Church and the Interfaith Alliance, and served as the bishop’s deputy for public policy in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, where she represented the interfaith community in reviewing the policies of the Maryland state legislature, and often spoke at the State House before assembly and senate committees.

After a successful career at the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Martine Singer left the business world to devote herself to improving the lives of children and families affected by violence and adversity. As president and CEO of Children’s Institute she oversees one of Los Angeles’s largest social impact organizations, with an annual budget of $100 million and more than one thousand employees; her most recent accomplishment is the opening of a new, Frank Gehry–designed headquarters in Watts. She has become a major influence in the city, helping to shape policy and bring about systemic change for communities affected by decades of racism and underinvestment.

Krysia is a hospice chaplain. After an 11-year stint living overseas, Krysia and her family settled in Newton, Massachusetts, where she was inspired to take courses at the Andover Newton Theological Seminary, and soon enrolled in a full-time program in the field. A member of the First Church in Cambridge Congregational, UCC since 2006, where she was ordained in 2016, Krysia serves as one of the parish’s community ministers. Krysia is a chaplain at the Visiting Nurse Association of Boston, where she created a virtual grief support group targeting the complex losses sustained in the community during Covid-19.

Nancy is a world-renowned epidemiologist whose work has frequently been motivated and defined by the glaring fact that inequities in risk of health-harming exposures, in rates of illness and death, and in lack of access to appropriate care are driven by social injustice, including structural racism, and that social justice is vital to advance health equity. Based in the Boston area, Nancy is known as the People’s Epidemiologist. Since 1995, she has been a professor of social epidemiology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she also serves as the director of the school’s interdisciplinary concentration on women, gender and health. Nancy’s counsel and opinions are often sought by a range of professionals, including the media, and especially so amid the pandemic.