CHICAGO— The Goldie B. Wolfe Miller Women Leaders in Real Estate Initiative (The Goldie Initiative), the country’s top nonprofit organization focused on preparing women for senior leadership roles in all sectors of commercial real estate, announced its 2024-25 cohort of program participants, with more than half hailing from graduate programs in the East Coast.
“Earlier this year, we launched formal programming in the Northeast to bring opportunities to more women pursuing high-level careers in CRE, and this record number of Goldie Scholars from the region shows our efforts are already yielding results,” said Megan Abraham, chief executive officer of The Goldie Initiative. “The talent pool of women in CRE is geographically diverse and bringing more of what our organization offers to East Coast markets will help us have an even greater impact on female leadership in the industry.”
New schools represented in the program, which offers scholarships and mentorship to women in graduate-level programs, include Boston University, George Washington University, University of Virginia and Yale University. They join other major East Coast schools represented in the program such as Columbia University, Georgetown, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Already well-established in the Midwest, where its founder Goldie B. Wolfe Miller built a long and highly successful career as a female pioneer in commercial real estate, The Goldie Initiative has been providing scholarship, mentorship, networking and skill development for women pursuing real estate-focused graduate studies in business, law, architecture and design, and management since 2007. Each year, a new cohort of Goldie Scholars is inducted into the program, many returning in later years to participate as ongoing supporters and mentors.
“As our community grows, so does our ability to reach the next generation of female leaders, some of whom may not have previously considered careers in commercial real estate,” said Katie Kazas, The Goldie Initiative board president and managing director – capital markets at Boston-based Longfellow Real Estate Partners LLC. “Studies of women’s advancement in the workplace show that having healthy representation of women at every level of the corporate pipeline is key to progressing toward parity in the C-suite. Programs like The Goldie Initiative are designed to support women in that journey.”
The organization’s East Coast events scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year include networking events on Oct. 23 in Boston, Nov. 12 in New York City and Nov. 13 in Philadelphia at Drexel University. For more information about The Goldie Initiative and how to support its mission, visit www.goldieinitiative.org.
