Engaging our outreach population is essential to the Society of Women Engineers’ (SWE’s) mission to create and sustain an inclusive community for women pursuing engineering and technology careers. Supporting members who provide opportunities for young women to explore these career paths is one of the crucial ways SWE has sustained a robust membership for more than seven decades.
In March 2024, through motion B2431 (found in the Member Only Resources section of the member portal), the SWE Board of Directors voted to make an instrumental shift in its approach to pre-college programming, management, and collaboration by merging the SWENext and Outreach committees.
SWE members’ outreach efforts were formally recognized by the board of directors when it approved the first Outreach Committee charter in 2009. The dedicated volunteers in this committee pioneered SWE’s flagship outreach event, Invent It. Build It., in 2011, and the created the pre-college membership program, SWENext, in 2015.
In 2019, the Outreach and SWENext committees emerged as separate committees. The SWENext Committee was created to focus on developing a SWE identity with pre-college students. The Outreach Committee was re-focused on empowering adult advocates to cultivate a STEM identity with underserved youths.
SWE HQ Outreach and Student Programs Senior Manager Darcy Andersen says, “In 2019, SWE’s outreach landscape was in a state of flux. In just four years, the SWENext membership had grown to more than 4,000 pre-college students, underlining the importance of directly engaging with this population and their desire for tailored programming and support. At the same time, the Outreach Committee expanded to serve non-SWE member adult advocates such as pre-college educators and parents.”
Fast forward to 2024, and the Society now offers dynamic pre-college programs such as the SWENext High School Leadership Academy (SHLA). Global growth has attracted more engineering volunteers worldwide who have unique insights into entering new markets. These diverse experiences require more program ideation and strategic engagement models.
“This growth highlights an opportunity for increased committee collaboration, rescoping, and rebalancing of volunteer-to-staff tasks for commercialized programs,” – Enanga Daisy Fâlé, Director – SWE Board of Directors
Therefore, we are merging the SWENext and Outreach Committees into the Pre-college Engagement and Support Committee.
FY24 Outreach Chair Leah Baker noted, “The shift was met with initial hesitancy due to potential scope creep.”
Understanding hesitancy with change, Director Fâlé introduced an annual planning process to position committee leadership to review the committee’s scope and operations through workgroups in partnership with SWE HQ. This helped uncover opportunities to rescale scope and operations across the committee and HQ.
In FY24, those opportunities highlighted an opportunity to scale certain committee programs for broader use globally. Hence, Director Fâlé introduced a program commercialization methodology, where the extraordinary pre-college programming solutions started at a grassroots level can be scaled for Society-wide management and utilization globally, allowing committee members to focus on innovating new outreach solutions.
FY24 Outreach Chair Baker noted that “the final team structure positions us well. Combining and streamlining both SWENext and Outreach efforts will enable SWE to share science and engineering more broadly going forward.”
The leadership team is excited about the organizational shift as it represents a societal focus on increased operational efficiency and strategic growth. As FY24 SWE President Alexis McKittrick highlights, “SWE has seen such incredible and dynamic growth in our SWENext and pre-college engagement in the last few years. I applaud our SWE leadership and HQ team for leaning into that growth — and the future potential it represents — by thoughtfully and collaboratively instituting the changes needed within SWE to allow our pre-college engagement to continue to grow and thrive.”
Specifically, members will see an increased focus on our educators, the piloting of experiential learning, and increased support for our association’s pre-college programming.
We need your help to achieve these ambitious goals!
For more information, please contact the Pre-college Engagement and Support Committee leadership at pces-chair@swe.org. The charter can be found on SWE’s governance resource center page under the Committee Charters & Operations Manuals section.
Written by:
Enanga Daisy Fâlé
Director – SWE Board of Directors
FY23, FY24 BOD Committee Liaison
Darcy Andersen
SWE HQ Outreach and Student Programs Senior Manager
Leah Baker
FY24 Outreach Committee Chair
Ria Bhatt
FY24 SWENext Committee Chair
