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Rallying for Smith
The Smith Fund’s one-day National Philanthropy Day
Challenge exceeded all records, raising $956,000
and helping the fund surpass its participation target
of 1,300 gifts. More than 2,000 alumnae, parents and
friends made gifts on November 12, 2014, helping
secure three major challenge gifts of $125,000,
$100,000 and $100,000.
Picker FamilyGrant
Supports Innovation
The family of Jean Sovatkin Picker ’42 and Harvey
Picker played a key role in making Smith the first
women’s college to offer an engineering program.
Now they are using their visionary approach to philan-
thropy to fund a pioneering pilot program in Design
Thinking and Innovation at Smith. Beginning this fall,
a $2.5 million grant from the Picker family’s Branta
Foundation will support a number of new courses,
including multidisciplinary course collaborations as
well as co-curricular workshops and design challenges.
The grant will be used to hire a co-director/designer
in residence and a Picker Professor of Practice in the
engineering program. The professor of practice will
open new areas of instruction, research and creative
work, and connect students to current developments
in the field. The Branta grant will also help Smith
establish cross-disciplinary “maker spaces”—work
spaces dedicated to creative collaboration that will
allow students and faculty to develop, build, test and
revise solutions to course-specific and campuswide
design challenges.
Teaching to Increase
Diversity andEquity in
STEM
A three-year, $300,000 gift from the Association of
American Colleges & Universities and Leona M. &
Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust helped Smith
ANewCenter for HealthandWellness
The Schacht Center for Health and Wellness opened last fall, placing all the college’s health services under one
roof. The 12,000-square-foot, two-story building houses a comprehensive health program, providing medical
services, counseling services, health education and wellness initiatives.
The facility, located adjacent to Scott Gymnasium and the Olin Fitness Center, is at the heart of a new
centralized campus wellness corridor where students can exercise in the fitness center and take care of physical
and mental health needs in the Schacht Center. The building is named in recognition of trustee emerita Nancy
Godfrey Schacht ’56 and her husband, Henry Schacht, for their decades of generous support to Smith, including
a recent commitment to the Women for the World campaign. At the dedication ceremony for the building in
January, Nancy told guests, “It’s a beautiful building, but meeting the people who work here makes me realize
that the inside is as valuable as the outside.”
The Schacht Center for Health and Wellness brings Smith’s health services under one roof.