Penny has "passed on" $2,600 to SisterMentors, a project of EduSeed, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. SisterMentors helps women of color to complete their dissertations and get their doctorate. The women in turn, while in the program, pay it forward by mentoring girls of color in middle and high school inspiring them to go to college. Almost all SisterMentors women work full time to support themselves and their families while pursuing their doctorate and therefore struggle to find enough time to devote to writing their dissertations.

Penny is designating her gift to any SisterMentors woman who is close to completing her dissertation. The funds will help the woman take time off from work so she can focus on writing the dissertation. This gift comes at a special time for SisterMentors as the program celebrates its tenth anniversary and its success of helping 28 women to earn doctorates and of sending its first group of girls off to college this fall.

What makes this gift particularly heart warming is that Penny's gift to SisterMentors comes through a lineage of three women who support women's education and who are committed to social justice. The lineage began with Jennifer (Jenny) Ladd, a philanthropic adviser, coach and trainer who co-founded Class Action, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing issues of class privilege and oppression "into the realm of public conversation and exploration." Class Action's aim is to raise people's consciousness so that they would act to change the class system. Jennifer passed on $2,500 to Sue Thrasher to help Sue with her expenses while Sue was pursuing a doctorate in education. Jennifer suggested that the money not be a grant or a loan but a gift that, when she could, Sue would "pass on" the funds to another woman (over 40 years old) pursuing her education. Sue agreed wholeheartedly.

Sue was a founder of the 1960s Southern Student Organizing Committee, an organization devoted to working with white college students on the issue of civil rights. As a veteran of the civil rights movement and a feminist, Sue understands well the continuing struggle for education and equity for women and girls. After receiving her doctorate in education, Sue passed on the $2,500 she had received to Penny Patch to help Penny pay expenses while earning her degree as a nurse-midwife.

Like Jenny and Sue, Penny is no ordinary woman. In 1962, at the age of 18, Penny dropped out of Swarthmore College to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), spending the next three years working in the Black Freedom Movement in Georgia and Mississippi. She was the first white woman to work on a SNCC field project in the deep south. She remains deeply committed to anti-racism work in her home state of Vermont.

The SisterMentors woman who receives Penny's gift will pass it on to another SisterMentors woman so that she, too, can complete the dissertation and get the doctorate. And the passing on will continue …

SisterMentors is encouraging women, especially those committed to social justice, to model Jenny, Sue and Penny's work and "pass on" funds to women pursuing their education. We hope that these women will catalyze a movement of other generous souls who will help hundreds, if not thousands, of women to complete their education.

For more on SisterMentors, including its tenth anniversary celebration, visit www.sistermentors.org. For more on Penny Patch and Sue Thrasher, see the book: Deep In Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement, (The University of Georgia Press, 2000). For more on Jenny Ladd and her work, visit: www.classism.org.