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Christina Gordon, SM ’92

Christina Gordon, SM ’92, joins Christopher Reichert, MOT ’04, to discuss her role as Co-Founder and CEO of the Women’s Foundation of Boston, a nonprofit organization working to make an impact in the economic empowerment of women and girls in the Greater Boston area.

Sloanies Talking with Sloanies is a conversational podcast with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they're doing today. Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Google, and Spotify

 Christopher Reichert: Welcome to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies, a candid conversation with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience, and how it influences what they're doing today. So, what does it mean to be a Sloanie? Over the course of this podcast, you'll hear from guests who are making a difference in their community, including our own very important one here at MIT Sloan.

Hi, I'm your host, Christopher Reichert, and welcome to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies. My guest today is Christina Gordon. So, some background before we start our conversation, but welcome, Christina, first.

Christina Gordon: Thank you.

Christopher Reichert: She is a graduate of Boston University's Questrom School of Business, Brandeis University with a master's in women's studies and sociology. And of course, the Sloan School with an MS in international finance and quantitative economics. So, she took the easy course clearly. She worked for years as an equity analyst with Fidelity and Wellington Management, and a stint at Genentech. And then a deviation, which I want to explore it a little bit further, she joined Rosie's Place as an ESL teacher, where she worked for eight years.

So, I'm pleased here in Women's History Month to introduce Christina Gordon, CEO now of Women's Foundation of Boston, which is a non-profit that economically empowers greater Boston women and girls through funding leadership and economic programs in partnership with other non-profits serving solely women and girls.

So, where to begin? Did I miss anything that you want to cover?

Christina Gordon: Well, that sounds like my LinkedIn profile [laughter]. But yes, that's my background.

Christopher Reichert: I'm glad that's accurate that we're in a good place. So, you started in finance and you did a lot of traditional, I guess I would say, a traditional path being an analyst at some pretty big organizations, Fidelity and Wellington Management. And then Rosie's Place entered the picture. So, tell me how that came about?

Christina Gordon: Well, let's see. After I left Sloan, I worked at Wellington as a telecom technology analyst, which was super exciting. It was before the internet. So, it was really, really an interesting time to be covering those stocks. I found it really compelling and it was wonderful. And then I got married and had my first child, and I requested a four-day work week, which was rejected.

This was a very different time than it is now. When I went to Sloan, let's see, it was about... The class was much smaller, and I think our class was about 18% women, and half the class was from outside the U.S. So, there was only a handful, I want to say, like maybe 20 American women in our class. And this was similar to my experience at Fidelity as an equity analyst, so I wasn't really out of my comfort zone, but this was a very different time in terms of women and working.

So, how did I get from there to where I am now, or how I got to Rosie's Place was I basically stopped…I left my job at Wellington to raise my daughter, and then I had three more children. And then I went back to school to Brandeis to get a master's in women's studies, and I focused on working women. And basically, I wanted to apply my business skills that I had learned at Sloan, and ultimately work for a feminist non-profit.

I recognized really early on that non-profits were often run by social activists, and that applying a business lens to non-profit work could be a game changer for their impact. So, as I was at Brandeis, I started doing some serious philanthropic work, some volunteer work, and that's what led me to Rosie's Place. And I ended up on their board and on their executive committee, on the development team and teaching ESL, as well, to women during the day.

Christopher Reichert: Which language? Is it Spanish or Portuguese or another?

Christina Gordon: I taught them only English, and I only spoke in English.

Christopher Reichert: Okay.

Christina Gordon: They were women with all different languages.

Christopher Reichert: All over the place.

Christina Gordon: All over the place.

Christopher Reichert: Wow, that's interesting. My sister does that as well, and she enjoys it. She finds that as opposed to eighth graders, who don't really want to be in classroom, these are people who really do want to learn a new language to get ahead.

Christina Gordon: They were the some of the most motivated group of women I have ever met. They were obviously total optimists, which is what I used to tell them, because if they were in this classroom despite all the challenges that they faced, they clearly were optimists and upwardly mobile, which is ultimately what everyone should be.

Christopher Reichert: Yes, that's what we want, the American dream. So, I'm going to go back to one of something you said a moment ago about introducing business processes or a business lens into organizations, which historically oftentimes are socially driven, but maybe not organized in a way that leverages their social energy in a way that's sustainable. Did you get any resistance in that in terms of some decisions that had to be taken that might've curtailed activities based on sort of, I guess, financial imperatives?

Christina Gordon: Did I get any resistance from?

Christopher Reichert: Those sort of thoughts into the process of like, "Oh no, here comes Christina. She's going to shut us down because…" whatever.

Christina Gordon: In terms of resistance, I did get some resistance from... And it was actually really great, because I think challenge is a good thing, but I did get challenged a lot by my classmates, the master's and PhD students at Brandeis.

Christopher Reichert: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Christina Gordon: Because I was constantly sort of pushing the envelope of incorporating business concepts to the non-profit space, and especially when it came to women and feminist organizations. And they were not used to hearing that at all. I was like labeled the “capitalist” at Brandeis in the women studies department, which I was happy to wear that hat, and share with them. There are positives in a lot of things, including capitalism that can be applied to other areas. And I'm still holding that torch, because the Women's Foundation of Boston is basically about… Bringing the group of women that run the Women's Foundation of Boston are all business women, and that's part of our pitch is that we bring our business acumen to the table, which is different and innovative and really, really effective relative to a lot of other non-profits, including foundations.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. And I saw that in your research, you revealed that women reinvest 90% of their incomes back into their families and communities, versus 35% for men, and funding women is one of the most powerful leverages for lifting whole communities and eliminating poverty and equity. And also I was very interested to see there wasn't that type of organization in Boston or Massachusetts, and 44 other places, which surprising for such a liberal state, right?

Christina Gordon: Yes, it is. And actually, when we founded the Women's Foundation of Boston, we were looking to make some impact in some work in economic empowerment of women and girls. And when we started looking, we started doing research and we found the really, really shocking data from Indiana University Lilly School of Philanthropy, which showed that only 1.6% of all philanthropic giving is directed towards women and girls serving non-profits in our country. 1.6%, and of that, 40% is sent overseas, which is twice the rate of all other giving.

Well, that really shocked us. And then when we started doing more research and we found that, like you said, women reinvest 90% of their incomes into their families and communities.

So, there's a multiplier effect by channeling and investing in women in terms of non-profits and grants, and yet they only get this small little amount. It really doesn't make sense for overall communities. And there are women's foundations all over the country and they're all different. Our organization focuses exclusively on economic empowerment, and that's very intentional because myself and the other co-founders felt that if you raise a woman's economic status... Well, studies show, if you raise a woman's economic status, all of her life variables go up, as well as for her children.

Christopher Reichert: Excellent.

Christina Gordon: So, that's... Go ahead. Sorry.

Christopher Reichert: Did you work at all with the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, they have their Pinnacle Awards, which celebrates successful women leaders. And I was thinking that they're avenue for highlighting some of the work that you're doing, but also teasing out some of the women out there who are doing some good work in the community.

Do you think that the 90% of income versus 35%, do you think that'll change over time as we hopefully go to parity in pay and parity in opportunity, and presumably other sorts of elements will become more equal—sharing the child rearing, sharing all the other aspects of being a parent? And I guess all the roles that mothers have traditionally taken on.

Christina Gordon: Well, Christopher, I hope so. I hope so. These statistics are very sticky. They don't seem to move a lot. That 1.6% has been there for about 15 years. And it didn't change two years ago when they last did the numbers and the recent fallout from the pandemic and the shecession that's going on indicates that things aren't changing as quickly as we would hope, but yes. And that's exactly what we're doing. We're promoting and funding programs that somehow economically empower women and girls. And we hope that we are joined by more and more, and that that will change things.

Christopher Reichert: And when you're talking about the 40% going overseas, is that sort of focused on developing countries and sort of obvious areas that... Well, more obvious, I suppose, areas of need versus what we rightfully, or mostly wrongly, assume is a stable community and environment than the U.S. despite all signs of poverty and all the rest.

Christina Gordon: Yeah. I think the 1.6% of the time when people feel compelled to write a check towards women and girls serving non-profits, they're 40% of the time going to send it overseas. And I do think that that's a perception that American philanthropists have, but if they look deeper, they'll probably see that a large portion of women and children and just populations within Boston or JP are food insecure. So you don't have to go to another continent to find food insecurity. So, I'm hoping that our message is resonating with the Greater Boston community and we'll shift that giving.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. I always ask the question to myself when I think, "Well, when people say, 'Well, there are there areas of greater need or no, we're going to focus on this area and there's lots of pats on the backs about Boston this and Boston that.'" I always ask the question in my mind of, "Well, is this the best the city could possibly be?" And then you look around in neighborhoods and see that there are poverty and food deprivation and education issues and inequality. Well, no, it's not. So we need to keep focusing and keep pushing. And so I applaud the work that you're doing.

 I see that your board and staff share some of the same organizational DNA as you so Fidelity, Rosie's Place, Wellington. Tell me about your network and how you've leveraged it and how do you make the ask to be a part of what you're doing?

Christina Gordon: Well, our network, we started out, Ami Danoff who's also a Sloan graduate and Kim Boucher and Christina Suh, the founders of our organization, they went to Harvard Business School. And all four of us have been in the Boston area, the majority of our adult lives. So, we had very vast philanthropic, business, and personal networks, which we originally tapped when we created the Women's Foundation of Boston. So, I want to say in, I think it was December of 2018, we sort of "went public" kind of for us. And we sent out... We had done a whole bunch of work and we got some seed money and we had given out some grants and we were ready to sort of announce ourselves. And we sent an email to basically our, an old school word, Rolodex.

Christopher Reichert: Rolodex, right?

Christina Gordon: We sent email to all our contact list and said, "This is what we're doing. We're really excited and please join us." And honestly, ever since we hit that send button, we have not stopped. We were overwhelmed with responses from our networks. Initially we were asked, "Oh, I'd love to come to your next information session." So we said, "Oh, right. Yes, yes. Our next information session is December 4th, 2018," which was our first.

Christopher Reichert: Right, right.

Christina Gordon: We had another one and then we had another one and then we had another one and we just kept filling our space. And then we started branching out. Now we do information sessions at corporations almost weekly, because our message really resonates with the corporate set. So, we started with our personal networks and our professional networks, but it has exploded way, way, way beyond that now. And so now we have... Most of our growth comes from, believe it or not from our website.

Christopher Reichert: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Christina Gordon: Companies and women and men reach out to us; they find us on our website and then they reach out to us. Also, we were very strategic at the beginning to cultivate and create an amazing board which initially was our advisory board, and now is our formal board of directors. And those trustees are extraordinary women in the Greater Boston community, just powerhouses.

Christopher Reichert: Absolutely.

Christina Gordon: And they also have incredible networks.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. I saw some heavyweights on there, for sure.

Christina Gordon: We have amazing, amazing women on our board. We are so grateful and honored really, truly. They are really impressed with our work. And again, the reason why our mission resonates with our board, with corporations and with other men and women is because of our business lens. So, when we do our deck, it is very much like a business deck and it talks about our analysis or financial analysis, our impact, how we measure impact, how we track donors, how we track our grantee partners. Our whole method, everything we do is based on our business acumen. And I think that that's extremely unique in a very positive way.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. This is a deck that would make any MBA student proud, or professor, I should say.

Christina Gordon: And we've also brought on a whole bunch of Sloanies that we would never be where we are without all of our Sloanies, including obviously Ami Danoff, the co-founder and one of my closest and dearest friends, actually, and Carmen Ball, who went to Sloan with us and Jill Roberts, who's on our advisory council, Matt Verlinden's on our advisory council. Rosalina Feliciano is a Sloan grad, she's on our board. And then we have a whole bunch of other MIT people, Linda Henry, Rana el Kaliouby, Victoria Gonin. We have an enormous number of Sloan and MIT people that move our mission forward. So, it's quite a group.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. So, how did you choose Sloan back when you were looking around for a degree?

Christina Gordon: That's a great question. I chose Sloan because I was really attracted to the quantitative focus. I am a quantitative person. So, I thought that that would be an environment in which I would thrive and grow. And at the time, there was this distinction that... And I'm not sure if it's still the same, but at the time Sloan had the highest salary coming out of business school at the time, which I had a pile of student loans. So, that attracted me as well. Truth be told. So, yeah, and I had friends, I had a deep network of friends and colleagues in the Boston area. So, I wasn't anxious to leave. Let's just say I was happy here.

Christopher Reichert: Did you keep in touch with many of your Sloan classmates or some of the women you work with now who are Sloanies? Were they classmates at the time or?

Christina Gordon: Yes, actually Michele Sweeney is another classmate from Sloan. I was part of the SWIM, which is Sloan Women in Management group, which still exists-

Christopher Reichert: Yes.

Christina Gordon: ... because we're actually collaborating with them on a project that we're doing to get more executives on women and girls serving non-profit boards, we have sort of a matching... One of our side hustles, is what I call it is, to get more high-quality board members on women and girls serving non-profits. Anyway, so Michele Sweeney is still a very close friend. I'm very close with a lot of my Sloan friends and I had no idea at the time that all these women, and a couple men, that would remain in my life forever, actually. It's been quite meaningful in unexpected ways. I have more connections and friends from MIT than certainly from my other schools that I attended.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. That's interesting. I have that same experience between the Kennedy School and the Sloan school. I spent so much more time volunteering at MIT and Sloan and the Sloan Alumni Club of Boston than I do up at the Kennedy School. They seem like I've got a covered, so they don't need me, right?

Christina Gordon: Yeah, but I was attracted to Sloan. I was inspired by the really intelligent, interesting people that also had a very strong work ethic. And they were very authentic people, very authentic.

Christopher Reichert: I get that a lot when I have spoken to people.

Christina Gordon: Yeah.

Christopher Reichert: They got into the top business schools and they come back and say, "You know what, I kind of resonated with the people who would be my peers and then my classmates, and then my network after..."

Do you have a memory of a professor or a class that you refer back to in your mind or maybe classes you wish you had done?

Christina Gordon: No, I don't have any classes that I wish... A couple of memories, are one is the Mac Lab. So when I went to Sloan, there were no such thing as a laptop, right? And so the Mac Lab always had a waiting list. They actually had a sign-up sheet outside where you would sign up for when you could use the Mac Lab. And I should've bought Apple stock right there because there was a line out the door always for the Mac Lab. No matter 2:00 AM—the Mac Lab was filled. Whereas the PC Lab there was rarely a wait, there were dinosaur PCs that the four engineers were in there and everyone else was waiting for the fun Macs to play with. So, I do remember that distinctly.

In terms of classes, I had an options class, I don't remember the name of the teacher, that was quite challenging, but I loved quantitative challenge.

And I loved it so much that I actually took a job. I probably shouldn't say this, but I took a job out from when I was graduating from Sloan at an options trading firm in Chicago. I was going to be an options trader. It was called O'Connor & Associates. And I accepted the job. I think I even got a signing bonus. Then I got a job. Then I got a job with Wellington and I took that instead.

 Again, this was 1990, whatever the heck it was two or whatever. I was given the first computer in my office that showed real-time data, was basically hooked up to the internet. And I was the only person who had it. I was the pilot and everybody else… This was when we sat out in the hall and everybody will stood out in the hall and you would get your stock quotes and information from a Quotron. It was a machine called a Quotron, just like a box. And so I was given that... I was given the pilot because I think I had gone to MIT. And even though I'm not a technologist, they were like, "Oh, she went to MIT, let's give her the pilot." And then they interviewed me to get feedback. And I was like, "This is miraculous." To have real data on your computer at your desk was unheard of. It was literally unheard of. And it was the best thing that ever happened.

Christopher Reichert: It is! Are you from the Boston area originally?

Christina Gordon: No. I'm from the New York area originally. Like everybody, I came here for college and didn't leave.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah, that's exactly right. I was in Australia and I came for graduate school and haven't left yet. I was interested to see in your deck, you talked about the no staff overhead and 100% of donations go to women and girls. How does that work? So how do you cover your overheads?

Christina Gordon: Well, that is an excellent question and I'm really glad you brought that up because it's one of the unique things about the Women's Foundation of Boston. We are an all-volunteer organization, so we are all unpaid staff. I am the CEO, and we have a CFO, Ami Danoff. Our COO is Patti Satterthwaite. And then we go down the line and we have 103 volunteers. We just went through our volunteer directory last night. 103 volunteers of which about 95 are women. The majority of which are working women. In fact, almost all are working women. There's a handful of college students. There's a handful of retirees, recently consulting. A lot of consultants who retire don't want to really retire. So, they tend to do awesome work for us.

And so how it works is I manage 100 of the volunteers, but it's just like a company, we have an org chart, we have divisions, we have division heads. We have pro bono lawyers, pro bono accountants. We have a whole social media team, marketing team, development team, tech team. And so, it's an interesting model. We want every dollar that goes to the Women's Foundation that's donated to go directly to women and girls serving non-profits. We really want to move that 1.6%. And so we work very, very hard to get that accomplished. And it's an army of amazing women, and men, that feel excited about our mission. And as long as the people feel excited about our mission, they feel compelled to do the work. So, it's really great.

Christopher Reichert:  So, is that something you went into... Is that a model that you thought, "Well, we're going to do it this way," from the get-go, or did you evolve into that?

Christina Gordon: That's a good question. We planned it from the get-go, but what's changing now is we've grown significantly, right? So, we are poised to raise probably $2.5 million this year, which may not sound like a lot in different realms, but in non-profit space for a startup, that's actually a lot of money. So, we've been growing so quickly that we have now begun to look at where we're starting to apply for grants so that we can fund our internal capacity growth. So, we were given a grant in 2019 by a very large local foundation that wanted to remain anonymous, sadly, but they gave us a large grant and they told us specifically what to do with that grant, which was to get a non-profit strategic plan, consultant to give us a strategic plan.

So, we get a five-year strategic plan, and now we're looking to fund that and that involves hiring. But what we're doing is we have a very unique strategy and it's very intentional, which is to go to foundations and apply for grants to fund our internal capacity growth so that public donations can still go to directly to programming. And then we have another traunch of specific donors in our board who will fund our endowment, so that in five years from now, we can have a large enough endowment that will pay for the internal hiring.

Christopher Reichert: And is that a public campaign, a capital raising campaign?

Christina Gordon: It is not. Not yet. Not yet. But it'll get there. We're always fundraising. We're always fundraising, but-

Christopher Reichert: I'm curious about what sort of scale of fundraising you need to do for that? I guess you're in a quiet time right now, where you get the 50 or 50% or whatever it is before you then go public. What size of endowment is needed for that? I worked at an organization which had a seven-figure endowment, which didn't seem enough, but I guess it really depends on how you structure yourself, right? With volunteers that makes it easier.

Christina Gordon: Exactly. Exactly. And we spend almost nothing. The only thing we spend money on, and you'll be thrilled to hear this, is technology. That's the only thing we spend money on right now. So, our goal is to have a $10 million endowment and we're on the way to get there. We feel extremely optimistic and confident about our fundraising ability. We have an amazing development team that helps us do that work, but actually, Christopher, to be honest with you, we have incredible numbers. Our impact numbers are extraordinary. And the amount of impact we have had in such a short period of time is such a great sell. We really don't have to do much other than to show people what we do and how we do it, and they are blown away.

Christopher Reichert: So, this is the 8,700 women and girls live and virtual, the 626 girls and women participating in mentoring programs, over 1,200 athletes, tweens and teens, and non-profit leaders. Tell me about the newest fund, which is the COVID Response Fund?

Christina Gordon: So, last year, middle or the end of March, I was on a call with about, I think it was like 175 funders in Massachusetts, and there was an emergency call—Zoom—and discussing what the philanthropic foundations and funders were going to do about this situation. We realized that there were all these funds, COVID response funds set up for bartenders, for actors, for students, for construction workers—not one was set up for women, or even had women and or girls in their description. So we immediately realized that we had to do something fast. So we created the Women's Foundation of Boston Response Fund, and we quickly raised about a half a million dollars, and we pivoted and we started granting pretty quickly. In fact, I think our first grant was March 27th.

And one of the things that we do really, really well is we vet. We vet very, very skillfully. We focus highly on financial analysis and future impact and need. And we did not drop that vetting process, which a lot of foundations and funders did, which is their prerogative, for sure. But when we were getting donations to our COVID response fund, we were telling our donors, please don't be concerned because we are going to use the same intense vetting techniques that we use all the time for our response fund. And so we granted out the $500,000 to a variety of women and girls serving non-profits, and people are surprised to hear, but I know you'll be thrilled to hear, that a large portion of our granting from our response fund was for technology. It was to enable the non-profits that serve women and girls to pivot to virtual.

And I cannot understate the impact that this has had on our community, because this enabled the big sisters to stay connected with their littles. This enabled these girls who were in total isolation to stay connected to their ambitious, awesome community at Science Club for Girls. It enabled the Girl Scouts from Eastern Massachusetts to pivot to Girl Scouts at home. And a large portion of these girls, the majority of our grants go to women and girls beneath the poverty line, and they lived, and are still living, in pretty... Some in some very high risk situations. So, this became their lifeline. I can't underestimate the impact that this has had, and we measure our impact almost to a fault—we're like obsessed with impact measurement—but we measure our impact every six months and we just finished our second half 2020 impact data. And that involves a Zoom, a one-on-one call on Zoom with the non-profits to go over the data.

And I can't tell you the anecdotal information that we got from all of the non-profits that we have been supporting. It has been tremendous. And we feel like the value of the Women's Foundation of Boston today is so much greater than it was even relative to a year ago. So, if this were a stock, it would have exploded in 2020 because our fundraising went up. I think it was 30% or 25%, despite the pandemic, which was very challenging fundraising for anything but food. So, our mission resonates, our impact is exploding, and we feel really proud of our accomplishments.

Christopher Reichert: That's fantastic. I think when the history of COVID, the year plus of COVID is written, I think there'll be a lot of these stories that come out that looked... The way it looked a year ago compared to what happened over the last year, it will be surprising to see where the successes and roots have been placed for future success during that year of strife. I think a lot of organizations stepped up like yours.

I see the impact breakdown in my program. So right now, the largest impact is adult ed. How do you see that evolving over time, the programs? Where you focus your energies?

Christina Gordon: Well, we have a very sophisticated grant cycle process. We had actually Carmen Ball who was at Sloan when Ami and I were there. She is a Stanford engineer originally. She created custom grant making software for us, which is incredibly effective. And we also have a very sophisticated proprietary scorecard system. And so every year we invite a group of non-profits that solely serve women and girls, and somehow economically empower them, and our vetting process is like I said, very intense. And what comes out of that is the decisions on who we grant to and what kind of programming. It really comes down to... Christopher, it comes down to impact.

Christopher Reichert: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Christina Gordon: We want to get the biggest bang for our donor dollars. And we take the fiduciary duty of our donor dollars very seriously. So, we only grant on programs that we really feel are going to make a huge, huge impact. So, if that is education or career negotiation workshops, or science club afterschool programming, we basically grant based on impact. We're always looking at the variety of how our granting comes out, but the main driver is impact and need. I don't know if that answer the question?

Christopher Reichert: Yeah, no, absolutely. What's your definition of success?

Christina Gordon: So, my definition of success is being really effective at something that has a lot of value and that's different for different people, right? So feeling really passionate about what you do, like I do, and being really effective at it, which I try to do, and yielding something that has some sort of value, I think is really, really important for me anyway.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah. Do you have any advice for prospective Sloanies?

Christina Gordon: Graduate school is really fantastic, having done it a couple of times, and I think it's really great, like all parents say... I have four adult children, well, one is still in high school, and some of them are in graduate school, some of them are applying to graduate school right now. And I always say the best thing to do is to take full advantage of everything that is being offered because A, it's super expensive. It's really expensive and you might as well get everything you can out of it. Gaining relationships with your classmates and your professors is kind of really what it's all about, right? Because you can read a book about option strategies, you can read a book about... And you can read a book written by the professors at the schools and you could probably take online classes that mimic the curriculum. So, I think it's more about fully immersing yourself in that and taking full advantage of it.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah, I totally agree. So, just one thing to make you feel better about not buying Apple stock. I nearly bought Microsoft stock and had I purchased the amount that I was going to purchase, it would have at one point been worth $32 million. So, I don't feel bad. There you go. We have those moments, right?

So, I want to thank my guest, Christina Gordon, the CEO, Women's Foundation of Boston for conversation today. And if you want to get involved, the website is wfboston.org. Of course there are the Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, WFBoston, and you can volunteer, donate, fundraise, and connect. It's a very worthy cause. So, thank you very much, Christina, for joining Sloanies Talking with Sloanies today.

Christina Gordon: Thank you, Christopher. I really had a great time speaking with you.

Christopher Reichert: My pleasure.

Sloanies Talking with Sloanies is produced by the Office of External Relations at MIT Sloan School of Management. You can subscribe to this podcast by visiting our website, mitsloan.mit.edu/alumni, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Support for this podcast comes in part from the Sloan Annual Fund, which provides essential flexible funding to ensure that our community can pursue excellence. Make your gift today by visiting giving.mit.edu/sloan. To support this show or if you have an idea for a topic or a guest you think we should feature, drop us a note at sloanalumni@mit.edu.