We are deeply honored to announce the creation of the Candace L. Straight Legacy Fund at the Center for American Women and Politics. Candy Straight, who passed away last year, was a longtime friend and supporter of the Center who both benefited from the work of the Center through her deep focus on our data and supported the Center’s mission through her long-time commitment to Ready to Run® as a presenter in campaign training workshops. We have missed her terribly this last year and the absence of her insights in this election season are keenly felt.

Candy’s devotion to the data and elections work of the Center will endure. The Candace L. Straight Legacy Fund has been established to support the collection and analysis of data on women candidates, officeholders, and voters. This data is foundational to CAWP’s work and to scholars, journalists, and organizations committed to increasing the numbers of women in public leadership in the U.S.

Candy was a pioneering woman on Wall Street and private investor, philanthropist, independent film producer, mentor, and champion of women’s political equality in America whose passion for politics was built upon her compassion for others. She was deeply devoted to her family, particularly her brother Dwight and her mother Dorothy. This devotion rippled outwards to her beloved lifetime community of Bloomfield, New Jersey and into her unfailing vision of a politics of mutual respect, comity, and the hard work of compromise in service of improving people’s lives.

Learn more about the remarkable life of Candy Straight, her CAWP legacy fund, and how to contribute to this legacy at the Candace L. Straight Legacy Fund page on the CAWP website.

Last week, Rutgers Today featured graduating senior Neha Aluwalia talking about her Rutgers experience and how politics shaped her academic career. Neha began her time at Eagleton taking a Women and Politics Byrne Seminar co-taught by Ruth B. Mandel and Debbie Walsh. She then interned with CAWP’s data team before becoming an undergraduate research assistant working directly with our data services manager, Chelsea Hill. “She has a natural researcher’s intuition for how to get the information,” said Hill of Aluwalia’s contributions to CAWP’s data collection efforts.

Aluwalia worked on CAWP’s annual New Jersey County Report Card, which tracks women’s representation in all the state’s counties. On the experience of seeing this data collection put together into a report, released to the public, and generating impact, Aluwalia told Rutgers Today, “Now it’s out in the world, being used by advocacy groups to improve women’s representation.” We were happy to have Neha as a part of the CAWP team and are eager to see what she does next.