Eleven decades ago, when Mary Harriman and her fellow Junior Leaguers wanted to communicate, they likely sent a telegram or picked up a telephone receiver and asked an operator to dial an alpha-numeric code — “Murray Hill 2977” was the code at the New York City office in 1914 — over a crackly line. That is, if they weren’t dispatching a manservant to hand-deliver a handwritten note on parchment sealed with wax.

A Q&A with Chief Officer for Strategic Initiatives Anne Dalton, who has spent the last 27 years in a variety of roles at AJLI, the last few of them largely on the road or phoning in from her home office outside Portland, Maine.

You may have noticed in a recent story on connected online that The Junior League nominated several of its distinguished members to serve as delegates to Vision 2020, the decade-long gender equality initiative spearheaded by the Institute for Women’s Health and Leadership® at Drexel University’s College of Medicine to coincide with the 100th anniversary, in 2020, of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

Gathering brings 629 delegates to Orlando to connect with one another and share best practices
At approximately one o’clock on Thursday, April 15, the lights of the grand ballroom at Orlando’s Rosen Centre went dim as Junior League presidents, presidents-elect, and presidents-elect-elect filed through the doors for the opening session of AJLI’s 88th Annual Conference. Processing two-by-two in groups organized according to the decade in which their Leagues were founded, they made their way to their seats where they watched an edgy new video entitled “We Are The Junior League” celebrating …

Those who know her only by her cheerfully pragmatic presentations at Annual Conference or Winter Leadership, might be surprised to learn that AJLI Chief Financial Officer Martha Ferry is an intrepid traveler to some of the world’s more remote locales (the state seals of Burma, Botswana, Libya, and Laos, and many others can be found among the stamps in her passport), an able and adventurous amateur chef who once studied at La Varenne in Paris, and a devotee of alternative theater on New York’s vibrant Off-Broadway scene.

In February, AJLI joined the Vision 2020 Gender Equality Initiative, a project of the Institute for Women’s Health and Leadership® at Drexel University’s College of Medicine, which was conceived to stimulate dialogue about women and leadership in advance of the 100th anniversary, in 2020, of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.