Welcoming the new members of our Brooke Owens Fellowship executive team

In case you missed it, on Friday, we announced some big changes to the Brooke Owens Fellowship Program executive team! After operating as a three-member board, we're making our first ever change, as Lori Garver is stepping aside to make room for some new leaders -- and specifically, the type of leaders who too often go unrepresented on executive teams. As Lori rotates out her day-to-day role, Diana Trujillo, Caroline Juang, and Kayla Watson are rotating on.

Whether you know me in real life or only here on LinkedIn, you already know that Diana is much smarter and cooler than I am. She's also been a part of this Fellowship right from the very start -- we've both always said that if we hadn't been about two months away from the birth of our first child when the Fellowship began, she'd have been on the founding team. I'm thrilled to be able to work with her more closely on this project.

If you don't already know Caroline and Kayla, they are absolute superstars. They are both alumnae of our program, and have done spectacular jobs both as Fellows and as leaders and volunteers in their community. They are already doing great things only a few days into their spots on the executive team.

But here's the other thing I've got to tell you: the prospect of Lori stepping back from her day-to-day role with the program was absolutely terrifying. When Lori walked Cassie Lee and me through her thoughts about three weeks ago, half of my heart was bursting with pride, but the other half was frozen over with fear about how we could possibly keep this program going without her. Because Lori is irreplaceable. Every part of of this program has been a team effort, but clearly none of it could have happened without Lori. She's done so much for this Brookie family & taught me so much -- all I could see at first was what we were losing.

But we're But we're an intrepid bunch in the Brookie family, and we don't let a little fear stop us. So we got creative. And the more creative we got, the more excited and hopeful we got. In the end, we were able to move from the terror phase to the wild excitement phase.

One thing I've enjoyed so much about the Brookie experience is how introspective the whole program is. It's not only open to change, it's constantly looking for it, seeking ways to do more and to do better. That was the spirit here. And that lead us to select these three absolutely awesome human beings to join our exec team. I've already gushed about them in our press release, so I'll send you there to learn a bit more about why and how they are so cool.

Diversity brings strength, creativity, understanding, and success. We already had all of those things in the Brookie family -- and now, we've got even more diversity to drive further growth.

By the appalling poor standards of our aerospace industry, our

Brookies are already an extraordinarily diverse group. But there's still room for improvement. Certainly among the three folx who created the program, we shared a lot of common perspective & experience: we're all different in many ways, but we're also all white, well-off, et cetera. Our new board members, in addition to being awesome in so many other ways, will see things from a perspective that Cassie, Lori, and I simply don't have -- and that vision will make us better.

So now somehow, despite having a human who is as talented, generous, experienced, creative, connected, and kind as Lori step aside, we've managed both to build on strengths and to shore up weaknesses. That, my friends, is a success story!