Eisenhower Fellowships
2024 Annual Impact Award Dinner and Women’s Leadership Pin Ceremony
November 6, 2024
New York
Eisenhower Fellowships welcomed more than 120 attendees from 27 countries to New York on November 6 for an inspiring celebration of our Fellows’ impact around the world and the colorful close of the 2024 Women’s Leadership Program.
Women’s Leadership over the Decades:
How far have we come? Where do we need to go?
Rockefeller Foundation
EF hosted an intergenerational panel of six distinguished women leaders at The Rockefeller Foundation to explore the progress of women’s leadership—or the lack thereof—since the late 1960s, when women’s liberation rose to the consciousness of American culture.
Moderated by award-winning former NPR and ABC News foreign correspondent Deborah Amos, the panel featured former U.S. Ambassador Frances Cook; nine-term U.S. Congresswoman and EF Trustee Jane Harman; film, television and stage actor Becky Ann Baker; and Eisenhower Fellows Diane Melley (USA 2001), former vice president of the IBM Foundation and its Global Citizenship Initiatives; and Ambassador Fatimah Mohammed (Nigeria 2017), Permanent Representative of the African Union at the United Nations.
2024 James and Carol Hovey EF Impact Award
The annual James and Carol Hovey EF Impact Award highlights outstanding project work by an Eisenhower Fellow or group of Fellows that helps people live better lives by generating a positive impact within their professional fields or communities that improves people’s lives at the local, national or international level.
Camilo Fonseca Velasquez and Mariana Villamizar earned the 2024 Impact Award and a $10,000 USD prize for their work through RECON, a Colombian online platform that works to identify, inspire, connect and strengthen social entrepreneurship and peace-building opportunities in a country dealing with the consequences of the long-running war between the government, organized crime syndicates, Far-Left guerrillas and Far-Right paramilitary groups.
Since its founding in 2014, RECON has created a community of social enterprises with nearly 5,000 social business models, contributing to poverty and inequality reduction while confronting serious security risks to strengthen peacebuilding and environmental protections in Colombia.
Focusing on sustainable development and investing in education, RECON has positively touched the lives of more than 500,000 Colombians and strengthened more than 500 social enterprises through training and consolidation of their business models across the country.
2024 Women’s Leadership Program
Eisenhower Fellowships celebrated its fourth Women’s Leadership Program since 2010 dedicated to connecting and empowering women leaders from around the world to prepare them for the critical role that women play in confronting global challenges.
The Fall 2024 Women’s Leadership Fellows came from the worlds of entrepreneurship, government, law, venture capital, nonprofit management, refugee resettlement, climate change mitigation, environmental protection, entertainment, international trade and urban planning. These dynamic doers share a commitment to advancing civic participation, civil discourse and good governance in their home countries.
Trustee Matt Manders, chair of the EF Board’s Executive Committee, and George de Lama presented the 2024 Women’s Leadership Fellows with their pins and certificates to mark the end of their fellowship travels and immersion into the influential EF global network of leaders.