Through this organization, I hope to give back at least a fraction of what I've been blessed with in this world! The Wells International Foundation (WIF) is the culmination of years of my struggle to actively pursue multiple professional and personal passions in an “organized” way. Our six Strategic Focus Areas (SFAs) are inspired by these passions – they are:
- Women’s Empowerment
- STEAM Educat
ion (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics)
- The Arts (visual, culinary, and performing)
- Travel / Study Abroad
- Literacy
- Preclinical Safety Training and Mentoring
In 2012, I met a powerful advocate for non-profits at a dinner party in San Francisco. Her name is Sherita Herring and she made a lasting impression on me as she talked about the seemingly infinite number of things one can accomplish through the non-profit arena. Three years later, I took the plunge and engaged her to teach me the basics about this sector and get me started on the road to approval by the IRS. Thanks to her expertise, my application was approved in a short 17 days and we became an official 501(c)(3) organization on October 1 2015. WIF’s inaugural project was the art exhibition entitled Beauford Delaney: Resonance of Form and Vibration of Color that we organized with the French non-profit Association 1901 Les Amis de Beauford Delaney and Columbia Global Centers | Paris (Columbia University’s Paris facility) in Paris in February - March 2016 (The Arts). In conjunction with this event, we organized a program that brought university students abroad for the first time to create a digital Augmented Reality application for the exhibition and its catalogue (Travel / Study Abroad). We also organized a professional development program for K-12 educators who came to Paris to learn to incorporate art and technology into teaching methodologies for science, math, and the humanities (STEAM Education), as well as a scholarly French-American round table discussion on Multiculturalism in Today’s Art World. In successfully incorporating multiple SFAs into this single event, we set the standard for subsequent projects. As frequently as possible, we implement programs that unite two or more SFAs to maximize impact, obtain rapid results, and achieve the greatest possible economic efficiency.
