Students in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program at UMD have an even stronger network encouraging them to persevere through challenging lessons and define their core values.
The Women’s Studies Legacy Award was created in 2016 by UMD alumna and Swenson College of Science and Engineering Senior Development Officer Carrie Sutherland (Psychology; Women’s Studies minor ’88) with the goal of creating “opportunities to pursue learning experiences—on-campus activities, volunteering in the community—that shape recipients’ overall education and broaden their worldview beyond where they grew up and the classroom experience.
Each year, the award recipient is decided at the discretion of the College of Liberal Arts and the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program within the Department of Anthropology, Sociology, and Criminology. Sutherland intentionally chose this arrangement so faculty will have “leeway in identifying the student who best exemplifies the criteria and spirit of the scholarship.”
Sutherland created the award for two reasons. Firstly, “I would be a different person without my experiences in the Women’s Studies program. The program influenced the success I have attained because it helped me identify and define who I am and what is important to me.
"It gave me confidence, as a woman who grew up with very traditional values in a small town, to pursue what was important to me, to stand up for myself, to believe I could achieve whatever I set my mind out to...
Secondly, “As a development officer at UMD, I saw first-hand not only the impact scholarships have for the student recipients but for the benefactors who provide them. As a result, I wanted to know I had helped a student like me find their path in life.
One may think a person needs to be affluent in order to create a scholarship. However, Sutherland is forthright in acknowledging “I am not a wealthy person.” She has left a bequest in her estate to permanently endow the scholarship. In the meantime, her yearly contribution allows her to meet the student receiving the award and to experience the joy and altruism of helping others.
Just as her reasons for creating the award are precise, her motives for naming it the Women’s Studies Legacy Award are also distinctive: “Often a scholarship is named for the person creating it or someone they want to honor. I wanted to honor the magnificent professors I had—Beth Bartlett and Tineke Ritmeester stand out—and, having been in one of the earliest cohorts of the program, honor its history while looking to the future with hope that others who have benefited from Women’s Studies at UMD would honor the role the program played in their lives, or the professors who were a part of it, by also contributing to the award.”
Sutherland hopes the award will resonate beyond herself; likewise, she sees the program offering collective advantages. “Its focus on diversity, inclusivity, and equity propagates a personal need to not only identify injustice but to act on it. The classes come from across the liberal arts but from the lens of women’s studies, creating critical thinking skills important to success in today’s workplace. Confidence, conviction, and knowing your strengths and personal values, are all things study in the program can provide.”