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A successful Philadelphia science education program for young women is looking for a fresh start and a new home after years of being hosted at the Academy of Natural Sciences.
For more than 40 years, the academy ran the Women in Natural Sciences Program, or WINS, which mentored generations of budding female scientists. The after-school program accepted students at Philadelphia public or charter schools with financial need. Hundreds of participants have gone through the program. All of them went on to graduate high school, and the majority went to college.
It was so successful that in 2018, the White House and the National Science Foundation gave it a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring, and there is ongoing research to study the lives of participants.
However, program organizers say that at the start of this year, the academy and Drexel University stopped hosting it because the university was worried that the Trump administration would see it as not compliant with Title IX, which bars discrimination based on sex from programs that receive federal funding. The institution later announced that it was closing its museum, which permanently shut its doors in September.
After much negotiation, the WINS program spun off from the academy and Drexel and is now its own separate organization. This will not be the first time an initiative at the academy has spun off to become its own entity; the Please Touch Museum started as a pilot project at the academy in 1976. Although the WINS organizers hoped the academy and Drexel would have fought to keep the program, it will survive on its own, said Ninette Bennett, interim executive director.
“It sucked and it hurt that day that that decision was made, we all sat in a room and there were a lot of tears,” she said. “We felt like it was an opportunity for WINS to be able to fly and flourish and really spread its wings and not be subjected to the walls of the academy.”
