The Women’s Center announced Nov. 6 it has been rebanded as the Alumnae Center for Leadership. The Alumnae Center will continue to support the Women’s Center’s initiatives, like Operation Tampon and the Career Closet, through Cura Collective, an initiative under the Alumnae Center.

The center’s name change reflects the university’s desire to engage more with St. Joe’s alumnae, who make up over half of the university’s 112,000 living alums, wrote Becki Scola, Ph.D., associate provost for the Office of Inclusive Excellence and Institutional Effectiveness, in an email to The Hawk.

The center’s inaugural year will be directed by Mary Lou Quinlan ’75, H ’07.

Cura Collective serves as “the service and resource arm” of the Alumnae Center, Scola said. In addition, HawkHUB, St. Joe’s food and basic needs resource center, will also now fall under Cura Collective’s umbrella.

This shift to Cura Collective embodies the Jesuit value the name represents: cura personalis, or “care for the whole person,” according to Nikki Sunnen, Ph.D., faculty liaison for Cura Collective.

Scola said the value of cura personalis is evident in the work Cura Collective does.

“It strives to be an inclusive, empowering source of services, support, education and resources for all members of the SJU community,” Scola said.

The Women’s Center was officially established by the Commission on the Status of Women in 1992, spearheaded by a subcommittee of students with the goal of providing resources and education about gender issues on campus.

In more recent years, the Women’s Center became home to Operation Tampon and the Career Closet. Operation Tampon began in the spring 2021 semester as a joint initiative between HawkHUB and the Women’s Leadership Initiative to begin providing free menstrual products in bathrooms on campus. In the fall of the same year, the Career Closet opened, supplying members of the St. Joe’s community with free professional attire.

Anjana Mosakowski ’27, student manager of the Cura Collective, said the new name maintains the organization’s mission while widening its reach on campus.

“I think, for me, it means that we get to do the same exact work that we’re doing, but we get to also be more inclusive and possibly, hopefully, expand and reach a wider audience of people,” Mosakowski said.

Madeline DeMarco ’22, M.S. ’23, former student liaison for the Women’s Center, played a big role in the formation of these initiatives. During her time at St. Joe’s, DeMarco served as co-president of WLI and president of HawkHUB, which she founded in the fall of 2019 and officially opened in the fall of 2020.

DeMarco said the driving force behind these projects was a “commitment to equity” and her “stubborn impatience.” There were things that kept her up at night, she said: food insecurity and access to menstrual products and professional clothing, to name a few.

“When no one could respond to my questions, I created the answers, and I tried to do my part in filling in the gaps,” DeMarco wrote in an email to The Hawk. “Thus born HawkHUB, Operation Tampon and the Career Closet, my own answers to the questions that kept me up at night.”

While Cura Collective’s mission is similar to the Women’s Center’s gender-inclusive mission, Sunnen said the new name reaffirms that the services are not only centered around women.

“The initiatives we’ve been doing — Operation Tampon, Career Closet — those serve the whole community, and they’re not just for women,” Sunnen said. “I really like the tagline, so to speak, that the Alumnae Center for Leadership has: It’s ‘built for women, designed for all.’”

Providing these resources helps to ensure that all students are able to succeed and thrive, DeMarco said.

“For those who experience food and/or basic need insecurity, it impacts their health, academic success and overall well-being,” DeMarco said. “Access to these resources helps fill in gaps left by inequity and systemic injustices. When people don’t have access to meals, housing/clothing essentials or hygiene products, the stress of meeting their needs competes with their ability to learn, focus and thrive.”

Mosakowski reflected on the significance behind the new name and said she hoped students felt welcome in the space.

“I hope that they feel that it truly is a collective and that it truly is an effort to work together and a space to be included and inclusive also,” Mosakowski said. “I just want everyone to feel comfortable within that space and feel like they have that space for themselves.”