Those words from keynote speaker Mary Ann Bartels, GABELLI ’85, GSAS ’92, summed up the sentiment at the fourth annual Fordham Women’s Summit: Philanthropy | Empowerment | Change, held on Oct. 21. The annual summit is an opportunity for women across Fordham to focus on philanthropy, leadership, personal growth, and professional development. This year, the virtual event drew more than 400 Fordham alumnae, parents, faculty, and friends who tuned in from locations around the globe. From the comfort of their own homes, they listened to expert financial advice and heard from four panels that explored topics like personal resilience, maintaining a career—and a household—amid a pandemic, and relinquishing the need for perfection.

A key theme of the summit was the importance of investing at a young age and learning how to create a plan for personal finances and philanthropy. In her keynote speech “Turning Financial Literacy into Philanthropy,” Bartels broke down complex topics in finance and offered advice for women that spanned generations. 

Bartels spent more than three decades on Wall Street, where she developed research that helped advisers and clients make better investment decisions. She worked for more than 20 years at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where she was known as a thought leader, and she’s appeared frequently on CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business. 

She opened her speech with a few powerful statistics, including the percentage growth of women-owned businesses. 

“When we look at the employment that they are creating over the last five years, that’s actually up 8% compared to [the growth of]  all businesses of 2%. And when we look at women of color in the businesses that they are developing, their growth rate is at 43%,” Bartels said. “So not only will women have financial power—they’re creating new financial power.” 

Riding Out the Market Cycles

Bartels explained the big ideas behind finances to help her audience make better financial decisions. 

Markets have cycles that are generally controlled by fear and greed, she said. But more importantly, they tend to move in an upward trend. Long cycles tend to last 18 to 20 years, and the good news is that the most recent “uptrend” started in 2013, she said. She predicted that the U.S. will see at least one more decade of markets that reach new highs. But she also stressed that it’s critical to hold on to some investments even when the markets tank. 

“I can’t tell you the countless clients that came out during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 and never put money back in the markets again. Markets, I can guarantee you, will always go down. Do they always go down 50%? No. Will they go down 50% again? Yes, because that is the power of markets. That’s the power of fear and greed,” Bartels said. “But the diversified portfolio? If you hold it over time, you add to it over time, you collect dividends over time, that’s where the compounding and growth comes from … It’s called patience.” 

Perhaps most importantly, she urged the audience to start saving, investing, and growing their assets at an early age. 

“Build a solid financial foundation for yourself before you have any significant percentage of your assets given to someone else,” Bartels stressed. 

First Steps Into Philanthropy 

When you’re ready to start giving, ask your parents or family members about their financial advisers and find someone trustworthy who will listen to your needs, Bartels said.

“There are many advisers that will want to sit there and lecture you on what you should do, but they don’t listen to what you need or what’s important to you,” Bartels said. 

Bartels parceled out other pieces of philanthropic advice: Invest in things that are important to you, your community, and the world. Contribute, but don’t overextend. Consider seven key categories: family, finances, health, home, work, leisure, and giving. Don’t be afraid to ask charities how exactly your money will be spent. Finally, imagine your individual power as a single voice or instrument. 

“It’s beautiful to listen to one voice. But when you take a choir and listen to all the voices, it just magnifies—or if you take one instrument and you start blending in more instruments and creating a symphony, how much more powerful that becomes,” Bartels said. “Become that instrument to create that symphony that can have that impact [on]  what is important to you.” 

Honoring Pioneering Women

At the beginning of the summit, three accomplished women in the Fordham community were honored as “Pioneering Women in Philanthropy”: Mary Heyser, R.S.H.M., MC ’62 and Monica Kevin, O.S.U., UGE ’48, GSAS ’61, ’64, who were honored posthumously, and Regina Pitaro, FCRH ’76. 

The Impact of Scholarship Gifts

The event’s student scholar speaker, Taylor Bell, a sophomore studying international studies at Fordham College at Rose Hill and a member of the rowing team, spoke about how scholarship giving can help level the playing field. 

“Without scholarship support, there would be very few students of color at this institution,” said Bell, a recipient of the William Loschert and Paul Guenther endowed scholarships. “There’s such a gap between the marginalized and privileged in our community, and within that gap exists an opportunity to both educate those who have not known a life with such limitations and to expose possibilities to those who have been on the outside looking in for far too long.” 

“Fordham has lost a giant in Sister Monica Kevin,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of the University. “She was a scientist of great faith, a teacher of great wisdom, and a friend of great compassion. She served Fordham with deep devotion and love for half a century.”

Sister Kevin, known by all as Sister Monica, was born on March 19, 1920, in Ireland. In a video interview filmed in 2013, she said she knew of nuns whose parents had pushed them to join the convent. But for her, it was a deliberate decision. In 1937, she entered the Ursuline Sisters of Tildonk at Blue Point.

“I’ve never regretted it,” Sister Monica said. “There were good times and not so good times. But there were always those magic moments that make up for that.”

She lived to create almost a century of moments, many of them at Fordham. She was a scientist and professor who studied mouse chromosomes and crustaceans. She knitted with students and sewed Spellman Hall’s altar linens. She cheered for Fordham’s basketball teams from the gym stands. And she was famous for her homemade scones and Irish soda bread, which she shared with people across the campus community.

Her compassion, said those who knew her, shone through in both obvious and subtle ways.

“I asked her why there were no currants in her Irish soda bread,” Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., professor of religion and society, said when giving the homily at her funeral Mass on March 28. “She told me that Father Joe Dolan had diverticulosis and the currant seeds weren’t good for him.”

Sister Monica loved the opera, reading, painting, the Ursulines, the Jesuits, and her family, who now reside in England. And she loved Fordham, said Judith Kubicki, C.S.S.F., associate professor of theology—so much that it “flowed through her veins.”

“I used to refer to her as ‘Lady Fordham’ because she so embodied Fordham. She was probably,” Sister Kubicki said, laughing through her words, “more Jesuit than the Jesuits.”

Student, Scientist, and Sports Fan

In 1948, Sister Monica earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics—one of a trio of Fordham degrees. In 1961, she received a master’s degree in biology. Three years later, she earned a doctorate degree with a dissertation in cytology/cytogenetics.

After teaching in Brooklyn and Hartford diocesan schools and at St. John’s University, Sister Monica joined Fordham’s biology department in 1967. She went on to also serve as dean of summer session for 12 years, as president of the Faculty Senate, as director of the pre-med/health program, and as a member of multiple University committees.

Sister Monica was also the first woman to serve on Fordham’s athletic advisory board. In the 1970s, she helped the board hire athletic directors and head coaches for the football and basketball teams.

For her 40 years of teaching, research, and service, Father McShane presented Sister Monica her second Bene Merenti medal in 2007.

“Monica wasn’t just into soda bread and scones,” Father Ryan said. “She was a good teacher and an acute scientist.”

In Her Nineties, A Zest for Life

In 2001, Sister Kubicki met Sister Monica for the first time. At first, Sister Kubicki was intimidated by her blunt attitude. When Sister Kubicki asked her about apartment options near the Rose Hill campus, Sister Monica said in a stark Irish accent, “There’s a six-year waiting list to get into this building, so I don’t think you’re gonna have much luck.”

But their relationship changed. “Who would’ve known that we would become great friends?” Sister Kubicki said.

She recalled other things about her friend: an afternoon spent together at an Irish pub in Yonkers, a red outfit she’d bring out on special occasions, and her fondness for faculty parties.

“She was running around like a person two decades younger than she was,” said Sister Kubicki, who is in her seventies. “She was full of energy—loved to do new things.”

Sister Monica retired from her last Fordham position—counselor to retired faculty—in 2013. But she stayed connected to the community, living at the Rose Hill apartments and attending University events until April 2014.

That same month, she suffered a stroke while attending mass at the University Church. Even though she was stuck at St. Barnabas Hospital, she held onto her sense of humor, said one of her hospital visitors—John Carroll, associate vice president for public safety at Fordham. Sister Monica asked him to keep her stroke a secret from her fellow sisters, who were waiting outside her room.

“She said to me, ‘Hey John, don’t tell them about any stroke because I have summer tickets to go to Ireland, and they won’t let me go if they find out about this,’” Carroll recalled.

And he complied. “Monica, I’m not telling them nothing,” he said.

In the days before her death, arthritis and almost a century of living were taking their toll on her body, said Sister Monica’s longtime friend, Mairead Barrett, O.S.U., president of the Ursuline Sisters of Tildonk, who sat by her friend’s bedside and squeezed her hand.

But she also recalled the Sister Monica she had known over the past 50 years: the one with the “feisty personality” and a deep love of life.

“She’d be getting up, doing the jig,” said Sister Barrett, even as she got on in years. “[Sister] Meghan would put on the Irish music and say to me, ‘Oh my God, don’t let her fall down the stairs while we’re doing the jig! She just had this energy—this love of life, this joie de vivre.

“She knew how to take every moment and live.”

Joe DiBari contributed to this story.