Lynn Yeakel

A major national initiative of the Institute, created and co-chaired by Yeakel, is VISION 2020, a ten-year project to achieve women's economic and social equality by the year 2020 when the nation celebrated the centennial of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. The project, which is now a Center in the Institute for Women's Health and Leadership, was launched in October 2010 with An American Conversation about Women and Leadership® at the National Constitution Center (NCC) in Philadelphia. Delegates from all 50 states and the District of Columbia participated. A women's history exhibition, commissioned by the Institute, opened at the NCC in conjunction with the Conversation. Subsequent Congresses were held in Chicago (2011), Portland, OR (2012), and Philadelphia (2014). In June 2013, at the invitation of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Yeakel led a Vision 2020 delegation to an international conference on Women and Warfare and moderated the closing debate in Scottish Parliament.[1]

Vision 2020 is allied with more than 80 national organizations representing 20 million women and girls that endorse the goal of women's equality. Yeakel and her team have raised over $3 million for Vision 2020 and have announced plans to host the national centennial celebration of the 19th Amendment in the year 2020 in collaboration with the National Constitution Center and the City of Philadelphia.[1]

Other programs developed and led by Yeakel include "Conversations about Women's Health," a popular community education program, and the Woman One Award and Scholarship Fund, raising funds for medical tuition scholarships for minority women. There are currently eight Woman One Scholars studying medicine at Drexel, plus 16 who have graduated and are practicing medicine in underserved areas around the nation; three new Scholars entered in August 2014. Each Scholar receives $80,000 in tuition support over four years.[1]

Yeakel was also a founder and Board Chair of Women's Way, the first and largest women's fundraising coalition in the nation, and served as its CEO from 1980 until 1992.[1]

A founder and former chief executive of the first and largest women's funding federation in the U.S., Women's Way, Yeakel won the primary in a U.S. Senate campaign in 1992 – the "Year of the Woman" – and nearly unseated incumbent Senator Arlen Specter in a nationally publicized race. The following year she lectured on more than a dozen college campuses and for numerous organizations across the U.S. and abroad.

In 1994, she ran for governor, finishing fourth in a seven-person primary field, behind State Treasurer Catherine Baker Knoll, State Representative Dwight Evans and the winner, Mark Singel, who went on to lose the general election to Congressman Tom Ridge.[2] Yeakel ran her final campaign in 2000, when she challenged incumbent Republican State Senator Dick Tilghman for his 17th District seat. She lost the election by about 800 votes, out of over 100,000 cast.[3]

Appointed by President Bill Clinton as the Mid-Atlantic Regional Director for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Yeakel served in that role from 1994-2000. Her leadership initiatives there included the Freedom from Fear campaign to end family violence and "Envisioning a Healthier Philadelphia," a coalition of more than 60 public and private organizations dedicated to improving access to health care. She also chaired the region's Welfare Reform Team, the Child Health Initiative and the Combined Federal Campaign and served on the national committee to implement the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). In 2010, she was appointed to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Health Care Reform Implementation Advisory Committee, developing recommendations for the Governor on the new federal legislation.