Page 17 - BusinessWest February 19, 2024

EDUCATION >>
Turning Ideas into Reality
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FEBRUARY 19, 2024 17
Five College I
Consortium Helps Its
Member Campuses
Accomplish More
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
[email protected]
na Clark recalls her experience working for the Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, which was not a job performed in a vacuum.
“You’re not only working on your own museum, but also collaborating with the development offices
of all the Smithsonian museums — and not only juggling all that, but finding positive ways for those relationships to work,” she told BusinessWest. “I love working with people to grow things, producing results they wouldn’t achieve otherwise.”
She brings the same mindset to her new role as direc- tor of Development and Sponsored Programs at the Five Colleges Consortium in Amherst, an organization that, for decades, has convened the resources of Amherst Col- lege, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and UMass Amherst to increase the capacity
of those institutions to create educational opportunities both on and off campus.
“Not everyone has the same strengths in everything, and there are certain things they wouldn’t have the bud- get or structure to take on,” Clark said of the five campus-
“This is all about getting people inaroomto think in a bigger- picture way than they do alone,
or accomplish collectively what they couldn’t do themselves —
just get outside their individual interests and think of the collective good.”
Faculty members from all five campuses meet together in a workshop at UMass Amherst as part of a program called Building Academic Leaders in the Humanities Program.
(Photo by Dan Little)