Wurtele Center for Leadership

Workshops, Events, & Honoring Leadership

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For Faculty & Staff

Collaborative Leadership Resources

Community

Leading collaboratively necessitates that we foster self-awareness and embrace the productive tensions associated with working in diverse groups to create better outcomes.

Courage

Effecting positive change requires us to engage in the hard work of taking risks, building creative confidence, and practicing resilience in the face of failure and adversity as we build our leadership practice.

Purpose

Forging, evolving and pursuing a sense of purpose that is both personally meaningful and of service beyond the self is a necessary element of leading collaboratively towards the impact we seek to have in the world.

Voice

Speaking up and amplifying the voices of those who have been pushed to the margins is essential to true collaborative leadership and central to the project of tackling inequitable power structures.

Humility

Engaging in leadership from a place of humility and curiosity allows us to work collaboratively to create equitable and human-centered solutions to complex, urgent problems.

Erin Park Cohn ’00

Director of the Wurtele Center

Erin is a Smithie who trained as a historian and has since used her critical thinking skills as an educator and facilitator of leadership development and institutional change work. Before coming to Smith in 2019, she served as senior partner at Leadership+Design, a nonprofit consultancy working to transform K-12 education through developing educational leaders’ capacity as change agents and human-centered designers. Prior to her work at L+D, she served as dean of faculty and history instructor at a New England boarding school. Erin holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania; her dissertation research explored the work of a group of visual artists who understood themselves as activists for racial and economic justice in the mid-20th century United States.

Megan Lyster

Assistant Director of the Wurtele Center

Curiosity, collaboration and human-centered design have been at the heart of Megan’s 15 years of work in higher education. Most recently, she served as the instructional designer for experiential learning in the Center for Community Engagement at Amherst College, where she worked with faculty across disciplines to design and facilitate community-based and project-based learning. Prior to that, Megan taught courses and supported independent student work in social entrepreneurship at Hampshire College. She holds a B.A. from Hampshire College with a concentration in family and developmental psychology, and an M.A. from Prescott College with a concentration in education.

Annie DelBusto Cohen

Co-Curricular Leadership Development Manager

Annie holds a B.A. in psychology from Wells College and an M.S. in college student personnel administration from Canisius College. Trained in social justice mediation and intergroup dialogue, Annie has done work facilitating spaces to explore identity, equity and justice. She has a decade’s worth of experience in student affairs, specifically residence life and most recently managing the BOLD Women’s Leadership Network. She believes in the need for creating opportunities for students and the campus to engage at the intersection of human-centered design and leading for social justice/change.

Silas McClung

Co-Curricular Leadership Coordinator

Silas helps coordinate a collaborative approach to leading positive change at a large scale, starting in small places close to home. Most recently, he worked on regulatory and political issues in the professional services and foundation sectors for the Brunswick Group. Before that, Silas researched federal workforce priorities at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. He holds a B.A. in Politics and American Studies from Sewanee: The University of the South.

Sarah Hampton

Administrative Assistant

Sarah worked for 15 years in the frenetic world of magazine publishing in New York City before moving to Northampton in 2017. She developed her creative thinking and organizational skills through roles as a photo editor/producer and studio manager. Her appreciation for collaborative leadership and social innovation began with her upbringing in the Quaker community of Barnesville, Ohio, and continued at Earlham College, where she earned a B.A. in photography. Sarah values developing meaningful working relationships and has been learning the importance of strength, resilience and joy through nearly 10 years of trying to surf.