It’s said that great minds think alike, so it’s clear that Colorado’s women and girls have a couple of great minds working on their behalf.
At the same time that Dean Michele “Mike” Bloom was dreaming of a grander home for DU’s Women’s College, Merle Catherine Chambers, LLM ’84, was dreaming of a new home for the Women’s Foundation.
When those minds met, they did handsprings.
“In our original meetings with the Women’s College,” Chambers remembers, “one of the challenges was to get us to stop talking about all the things we could do and just focus on the building. We were jumping up and down because we were so filled with ideas.”
Chambers made a $3-million gift to jumpstart the capital campaign for what would become the Merle Catherine Chambers Center for the Advancement of Women, which officially opens Sept. 9. She is a former board member of the Women’s Foundation and currently serves as an honorary trustee for the organization.
“The whole point of the building is to pull the organizations together,” she says. “The synergy of the organizations—that’s what makes it so exciting for me.”
Although the building will carry her name, Chambers is quick to point out that the work going on inside is what counts.
“The people who are there are so capable and exciting that they will do things I’ve never dreamed of,” Chambers says. “I have such faith in the women who run the programs and the women coming through, that heaven only knows what will happen.”