Loras College Women's Leadership Alliance

03/03/2026

After her F-15E Strike Eagle was mistakenly shot down in a friendly-fire incident, a female U.S. Air Force pilot ejected safely and descended into Kuwait. Uncertain of what awaited her on the ground, she landed in unfamiliar terrain.

What happened next is what the world should remember.

Video captured by bystanders shows Kuwaiti locals rushing toward her — not with anger, not with hostility — but with concern. A man can be heard repeatedly asking if she was okay, if she needed help. His voice carried urgency, but also compassion. Then, in a moment that has resonated across social media, he thanked her for helping them.

In the middle of conflict, politics, and international tension, ordinary people chose kindness.

At a time when narratives often paint entire religions or cultures with a broad brush, this moment stands as a powerful reminder: goodness is not confined to nationality, race, or faith. Compassion does not carry a passport.

Kuwait is a Muslim-majority nation. The men who rushed to help that American pilot were Muslims. And in that moment, what defined them was not religion or geopolitics — it was humanity.

They saw a person in need and responded.

History is filled with headlines about division, extremism, and violence. But far more common — and far less reported — are everyday acts of decency. Neighbors helping neighbors. Strangers protecting strangers. Human beings recognizing shared vulnerability.

The image of that pilot descending from the sky and being met not with hostility but with reassurance tells a deeper story: that beneath the noise of conflict, most people simply want peace, safety, and dignity for all.

Kindness is universal. It transcends borders. It speaks every language.

And sometimes, in the most unexpected places, it shines the brightest.

02/03/2026

Astronaut and electrical engineer Christina Koch will become the first woman to travel to the vicinity of the Moon when Artemis II launches in as little as a week's time.

On her previous mission to the ISS, Koch lived in space for 328 days, claiming the women's record for longest continuous stay.

She performed six EVAs - three of them with fellow astronaut Jessica Meir - marking the first series of spacewalks performed by an all female team.

08/30/2025

08/20/2025

A Polish teenager has been recognized as one of TIME Magazine’s "Girls of the Year" for her contributions to science.

08/15/2024

The U.S. women's 26 gold medals are the MOST by a women's team in a single Olympics 👏 🇺🇸

Team USA | Olympics

08/07/2024

Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles literally bowed down to Brazilian gymnast Rebeca Andrade on the podium as she claimed first place in the gymnastics floor final.

Apparently Simone said that Jordan asked Simone, "Should we bow to her?" And Simone replied, "Absolutely."

“It was just the right thing to do.”

Can you just imagine?

Can you just imagine if women ALWAYS cheered for each other so enthusiastically, so boldly, so unapologetically, so joyfully, so selflessly?

Can you just imagine if women didn’t feel threatened by each other’s successes and used them instead as motivation?

Can you just imagine if women supported other women, simply because “it was just the right thing to do?”

This. Is. Everything.

And this is why I love the Olympics—because we don’t look to them just as an example of what we could be as athletes, we look to them as an example of what we could be as humans.

04/23/2024

Picasso almost ended Dora Maar's career, convincing her, when they were a couple, to quit photography because he was intimidated by her talent. There is a long list of artists suppressed by the petty hacks of European modernist movements, and a longer list of female innovators erased from public memory. Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning met similar resistance; Andre Breton and Dalí both also being misogynistic megalomaniacs who vanguarded surrealism from women; Henry Miller writing to Anaïs Nin that her stories were garbage and should be disregarded, only for her to discover whole sections copied word for word in his novels years later, all while she financed his existence.

Francoise Gilot finally gets an exhibition after this hack successfully ruined her chances of success as an artist while she lived, and her name is still omitted.

Rebecca Solnit suggests that the fact that the question "what is your mother's maiden name?" is often used for security measures is a meaningful indicator of the extent of women's erasure. What's in a name? A lot. If one's claim of one's own name meant nothing then colonisers wouldn't need to strip them from the colonised, and men wouldn't need to erase them in marriage, from history books and from reportage.

via Freyja Howls

03/27/2024

03/25/2024

Let's get to know our 2024 SCHOF Inductees!

Col. Heather Bogstie is both an alumna of camp programs & former staff of Space Camp!

She is currently a Senior Material Leader, Resilient Missile Warning, Tracking, and Defense with the US Space Force, one of the first female leaders in the Space Force. She has spoken at various events including Fortune Magazine's next Generation Most Powerful women event. We look forward to honoring you this June!

01/01/2024

Ida and Louise Cook were unmarried sisters in their mid thirties who lived with their parents. One wrote romance novels for Mills and Boon (England’s Harlequin equivalent) and the other commuted from their sleepy London suburb to work as a secretary for the civil service. They wore home made clothes and shared a love of opera. They loved opera so much, they would go to Germany for the weekend just to see the opera there. In the 1930’s.
No one paid attention to them crossing the border, a couple of dowdy women in their homemade clothes, nor on the return trip with their furs and jewels. What Ida and Louise were doing, in addition to going to their beloved opera, was collecting valuables from would be refugees to help them in their new lives. The sisters would find people who would vouch for the refugees, find people willing to home them, assemble papers for them, and even rented an apartment as a temporary space for refugees just arrived. The sisters used their own money for this, so the refugees could sell their valuables for money to help them settle in.
The women entered and left through different checkpoints, so the same guards wouldn’t be able to notice their sudden acquisition of too much jewelry, and created a lie about the valuables in their purses as ‘we can’t trust them in our apartment when we aren’t there!’ They acted simple and foolish and were never caught. They did eventually halt their visits over the border, after directly rescuing 29 people (mostly families), but they did not stop working. They continued to raise money and awareness, and to help refugees in England.
The sisters were honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in 1964.
Ida wrote a memoir that was republished as “Safe Passage” in 2008. In it she plays down their role, saying that what they offered wasn’t much. In exchange for saving lives, they only needed “some trouble, some eloquence, and some money.”

12/14/2023

10/07/2023