Ten years ago, the Belfer Center for Innovation & Social Impact welcomed the first cohort of the Women inPower Fellowship. A free mentorship program offered by 92NY, Women inPower provides senior level women-identifying leaders across all professional sectors the community, coaching, and tools they need to advance to the highest levels of leadership. But the Fellowship is about more than advancing a woman’s career — Women inPower emphasizes personal growth, connecting work to one’s fullest sense of self, and fostering a professional culture oriented toward social impact and creating a better world.
In celebration of the Fellowship’s 10th anniversary, we talked to one of the Fellows from the first cohort — Associate Vice President of Moms Clean Air Force and Director of Ecomadres Isabel González Whitaker — about how Women inPower has impacted her perspective on work, transformed her career, and introduced her to a community that has changed her life.
How did the Women inPower Fellowship influence your view of work and its role in our society?
I’ve had a really exciting second act in my career, and The Women inPower Fellowship gave me an invaluable sense of clarity, purpose, and community at a crucial moment before I made that shift. Up until the Fellowship, I had a philosophy that had worked very well for me: put your head down and work hard. I can attribute that to my immigrant upbringing — the experience of being a first-generation American sometimes makes you feel like an imposter, like you don’t deserve to be in certain spaces. Putting my head down and working hard got me pretty far in my journalism career. Being a part of the first Women inPower cohort coincided with me moving to the best job I had up to that point — I went from being a features editor at In Style to becoming deputy editor of Billboard magazine. My scope of responsibility went from fashion, celebrity and lifestyle to music at the intersection of breaking news. All the questions that came up in Women inPower were influencing how I was thinking about my work: where do I fit in this ecosystem? At what point should I stick my neck out for a peer? I had been myopically focused on my own diligence, and Women inPower broadened my perspective about what it meant to work collaboratively within a company. It also made me start to balance my mental and spiritual health with the demands of the job. It was a worldview that I developed at Billboard because of the experiences I had in the Fellowship, and I took it with me to my next job.
Tell us about your career path since you were in the first class of Fellows.
I am currently Associate Vice President of Moms Clean Air Force and the Director of Ecomadres. We work with 1.5 million moms and caregivers who fight for cleaner air across the country, using grassroots organizing to advance policy and regulation. I’ve been here for about a year, and it’s the third nonprofit I’ve worked at since I left journalism six years ago. I attribute my ability to make this pivot to the network I found at Women inPower. I went into it with the intention of soaking up every opportunity it presented, which I did. It has helped me so much in laying out a new path for myself — I had no idea where it was leading, but in retrospect it almost feels like it was by design. I was searching for something in myself and hungry for new opportunities beyond what I had been doing at that point for 15 years.
What was your experience during the Fellowship?
Fran Hauser told me about the program, and then Margaret Coady and Jenifer Willig were my mentors. These three women opened my eyes to an expanded professional worldview and gave me hours of advice on how to balance being my authenmtic self with my career journey. They all continue to inspire me today. Beyond them, I was meeting women who, like myself, were mid- to high-level career executives and were curious about other industries and pathways for women like ourselves. It was exciting, and it was invaluable to find a safe place to figure out what we had in common and where the grass might be greener, professionally. The Fellowship’s sense of leadership development was creative. We received mentorship and tools to help us refine our narratives. We were encouraged to ask ourselves: what is my story? Who am I? What are my values as they relate to my career and personal goals? I had never really asked myself those questions before. Up until that time, the community of professional women in New York that I was a part of wasn’t getting that kind of support. It was the beginning of a larger cultural conversation among professional women about how we wanted to play in this sandbox. It was wonderful to forge friendships and learn about the experiences of other women in ways that felt very vulnerable, very safe, and very productive. As a feminist, I appreciated this community, where we could speak about experiences that are uniquely ours.
One of the things that sets Women inPower apart is its emphasis on social impact in the workplace — did that emphasis influence your next career move?
Absolutely. I realized through the Fellowship that I had been missing something. I was able to capture bits and pieces of it at Billboard — we covered some of the mass shootings that happened at concerts, and that led us to have meaningful conversations about gun control and other issues. Around the same time, my mom passed away. I knew I wanted to do something to honor her life, so I created a park in her name — Sara J. Gonzalez Memorial Park, in Atlanta. Women inPower gave me that kind of permission to invest my time and energy in things that I found meaningful. It felt right to honor my mom and create a green space in her name. I then took that sense of purpose into an entirely different career.
What’s the one piece of advice you would give to a young woman who is just starting her career?
You constantly have to calibrate your work to who you are. There are different seasons of your career. You have to locate your values and adjust to those seasons, whatever they might be. Sometimes you have to have a particular job because you need health insurance — that’s totally fine. But be in constant communication with yourself and ask: am I where I need to be?
The deadline for applications for Women inPower 2025 is October 23 at 9 AM EST. Learn more and apply today.