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Martin Luther King Day Speaker Cecilia Conrad

Cecilia ConradWabash College invites you to a talk by Cecilia Conrad, CEO of Lever for Change and a managing director at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her talk will take place at 7:30 p.m., Monday, January 20, in Baxter Hall, Room 101 (Lovell Lecture Room).

Sponsored by the Wabash College Malcolm X Institute, Conrad will give a talk titled, “Lessons My Father Never Taught Me: Reflections on a Local Civil Rights Leader.”

Lever for Change is a new nonprofit affiliate of the MacArthur Foundation whose mission is to unlock philanthropic capital and accelerate solutions to the world’s biggest social challenges. In addition to her role at Lever for Change, Conrad oversees the MacArthur Fellows program and MacArthur’s 100&Change, the Foundation’s competition for a single $100 million grant to help solve a critical problem of our time.

Before joining the foundation in January 2013, Conrad had a distinguished career as both a professor and an administrator at Pomona College, Claremont, CA. She held the Stedman Sumner Chair in Economics and is currently emerita professor of economics.   She served as Associate Dean of the College (2004-2007), as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College (2009-2012), and as Acting President (Fall 2012).  From 2007-2009, she was interim Vice President and Dean of the Faculty at Scripps College.   

Conrad is a member of the board of trustees of Bryn Mawr College, The Poetry Foundation, the National Academy of Social Insurance, IES, and the Sylvia Bozeman and Rhonda Hughes EDGE Foundation. She is a trustee emerita of Muhlenberg College.  

Conrad received the National Urban League’s Women of Power Award in 2008 and the National Economic Association’s Samuel Z. Westerfield award in 2018. She has honorary doctorates from Claremont Graduate University and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. 

Her talk is free and open to the public.