One Million Reasons to Get Excited
JULY 14, 2021 | Today, the Brooke Owens Fellowship and Patti Grace Smith Fellowship were selected to jointly receive a $1 million grant from Blue Origin’s Club for the Future. This generous donation will allow the two programs to continue working to make the aerospace community more just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive, in particular by inspiring, recruiting, and training talented women, non-binary, and Black students into the workforce.
“Our recent auction for the first seat on New Shepard resulted in a donation of $28 million to our non-profit foundation, Club for the Future,” said Bob Smith, Blue Origin CEO. “This donation is enabling Club for the Future to rapidly expand its reach by partnering with 19 organizations to develop and inspire the next generation of space professionals. Our generation will build the road to space and these efforts will ensure the next generation is ready to go even further.”
The Brooke Owens Fellowship was created in 2016 with a unique program to provide paid internships, one-on-one mentorship, and an empowering community of peers to exceptional female and other gender-minority undergraduate students pursuing careers in any facet of the aerospace industry. Based on the overwhelming success of that model, the Patti Grace Smith Fellowship was created in 2020, following a similar structure and operating under the same 501(c)3 status in order to serve Black undergraduate students in community college or in their first two years of studies and who are seeking their first ever internship in aerospace.
Together, these two programs have already provided paying, challenging jobs for 241 undergraduate students; created 446 hand-picked, one-on-one executive and peer mentor relationships; and paid out more than $200,000 in scholarship support. Dozens of these young students have now begun full-time careers in the industry as a result of their experience. The incredible caliber of the two programs’ Fellows and the size of each program’s qualified applicant pool have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the lack of diversity in the US aerospace workforce cannot be attributed to a lack of interest or of qualified candidates among the under-served demographics.
The diverse group of industry professionals who run these two programs as volunteers issued the following joint statement:
We are enormously grateful to the team at the Club for the Future and at Blue Origin for this generous gift. In the few hours since they called us with the wonderful news, we’ve been in overdrive; there are so many ideas and projects that can build on our proven model and really scale and supercharge our impact. Our two fellowships will be working together closely as a diverse and empowered team to make the best use of this donation in a way that builds upon our existing values and priorities, and also opens the aperture to evaluate new ideas in service of our collective goals. In our 241 incredible Fellows to date, we’ve got one of the greatest pools of talent, creativity, and purpose imaginable, and we look forward to harnessing the innovation that diversity always brings to put this donation to good use!
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About Club for the Future
Founded by Blue Origin in 2019, Club for the Future is a nonprofit foundation whose mission is to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEM and to help invent the future of life in space. The Club and its collaborators are doing this through Postcards to Space, space-focused curriculum, and access to space on Blue Origin’s rockets. For more information visit, ClubforFuture.org
About Blue Origin
Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos with the vision of enabling a future where millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth. To preserve Earth, Blue Origin believes that humanity will need to expand, explore, find new energy and material resources, and move industries that stress Earth into space. On July 20, Blue Origin will fly its first astronaut crew on board New Shepard to space and back. To watch the launch live on July 20 or sign up for updates visit BlueOrigin.com.