Center for Women’s Leadership

NEW Leadership Oregon Alumni

Center for Women's Leadership

Our Vision

The Center for Women’s Leadership works in collaboration with seasoned and emerging women and gender-expansive leaders to advance the individual and collective practice of transformative leadership in Oregon and beyond.

We are excited to engage with a wide range of campus and community partners to co-create spaces in which we examine the practice of leadership at the intersections of race, gender, and other categories of difference, in order to enact  systems-level change.

PUSH actor addresses the audience

Thank you for joining us, April 25-27 for PUSH: Black Mamas Changing the Culture of Birth!

Co-Created by Dr. Roberta Suzette Hunte and The Beirut Wedding World Theatre Project, PUSH is a devised theater piece developed from interviews with black doulas, birth workers, medical and public health professionals, portraying the experiences of Black birthing people in medical settings.

 

 

New at the Center for Women's Leadership

Gender, Leadership & Policy Cohort

Cohort participants will spend 15 weeks together exploring our nation’s caregiving crisis and caregiving economy while focusing on the intersections of race, gender, and other categories of difference, in order to enact systems-level change. 

Cohort Updates

She'Posium

She'posium by Self Agency Academy is a community gathering opportunity on Saturday, May 18th focusing on mind, body, and soul wellness. We invite you to join us for an afternoon of somatic movement, relationship building, and celebrating the renewal of spring. 

Get Tickets Here

Engaged Scholarship Launches

The first project in our Engaged Scholarship series launches with Push: Black Mamas Changing the Culture of Birth, a theatrical piece by Roberta Suzette Hunte assistant professor in the PSU School of Social Work, showcasing the inequities of Black perinatal care in Oregon. 

Learn about Push

NEW Leadership Oregon 2025

NEW Leadership® Oregon (NLO) is an annual multi-session program curated for Oregon college students. NLO is an inclusive, intersectional feminist leadership program designed to inspire participants to identify and hone the skills they need to lead in their community. 

Apply Now
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Thank you for joining us at An Evening with CWL!

March 5th was another reminder of how gathering is a vital component of community-centered growth. Thank you to all who showed up for An Evening with CWL—both in person and online—and for sharing your evening with us. 

Check out some of our favorite moments from the night!  Thank you Andie Petkus Photography and Flash Photobooth for helping us capture the joy of the evening.

View All Photos about this content

The Center for Women’s Leadership strives to meet the needs of rising women and gender expansive leaders across our region by offering curated learning communities. These communities catalyze learning and growth around leadership practices that are explicitly anti-racist; grounded in intersectional feminist and queer ways of thinking, feeling, and doing; embracing of radical imagination; and dedicated to creating a culture of relationality and care among participants and in our communities.

Engaged Scholarship: A new initiative launched in Fall 2024, our Engaged Scholarship Projects create and connect learning pods of faculty, students and community partners to work collectively on consequential, mutually beneficial projects. 

Leadership Development: We co-design and facilitate leadership development opportunities in relational practice with community partner(s) and program participants.

Convening Community: Bringing people together is crucial to building and strengthening the relationships that make our collective work possible. In a variety of formal and informal ways, we convene and host gatherings of campus and community partners to advance the connective tissue that makes possible, nurtures, and sustains transformative change. 

Sentilla Hawley headshot

'You don't have to put yourself in a box'

Kristie Perry | April 7th 2025

At Verde, a Portland-based environmental justice nonprofit, you might have found PSU graduate Sentilla Hawley, BA ’22, fleshing out the strategy for a community outreach effort, putting the finishing touches on the collateral for a marketing campaign, or prepping to meet with TV reporters interested in covering Verde’s work to connect low-income Portlanders with affordable renewable energy. A proud member...
Read more about 'You don't have to put yourself in a box'
Alex Blackwill, PSU class of ‘22

Going Places: How One New Leadership Oregon Alum Discovered a Passion for Migrant Rights

Virginia Archer-Peak | January 28th 2025

It all started with the Mothers. Alex Blackwill, PSU class of ‘22, remembers first learning about the Madres de Plaza de Mayo sometime in middle school. The Mothers were a group of Argentinian women whose children had been forcibly disappeared by the country’s military dictatorship of the 1970s. Donning the famous pañuelo blanco (white headscarf),...
Read more about Going Places: How One New Leadership Oregon Alum Discovered a Passion for Migrant Rights
Dr Roberta Suzette Hunte on stage

Center for Women’s Leadership Partners with PSU Professor to Improve Black Perinatal Care

This fall, the Center for Women’s Leadership (CWL) at Portland State University launched its Engaged Scholarship initiative, a new program that will connect and create learning pods of faculty, students, and community members around consequential and mutually beneficial projects. The first project in the Engaged Scholarship series is Push: Black Mamas Changing the Culture of Birth, a theatrical piece by Roberta Suzette Hunte, assistant professor in the PSU School of Social Work, showcasing the inequities of Black perinatal care in Oregon.

Learn About Push

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