Congresswoman Barbara Comstock (VA-10) has announced that after she leaves her seat in Washington in January her program that seeks to groom young women for positions in leadership will be kept alive at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy. On Wednesday morning via Twitter, the school mentioned the effort for “future female policy leaders,” which Comstock volunteered to raise $250,000 in private funds to launch the summer semester program.
The program is designed for middle and high school-age girls and will be dubbed the Barbara Comstock Institute for Women in Leadership. Every year, hundreds of young women are shown opportunities for advancement and employment in both government and private industry, and received mentoring from other highly successful women in the Washington region.
“If you can turn young women on to public service and teach them they can do anything men can do — and maybe we’ll even recruit a few of them in to our school in the future — to me, that’s just a win-win for everybody,” Mark J. Rozell, the dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, said in a report from The Washington Post.
As Chairwoman of the Research and Technology subcommittee, Comstock started a version of the 10th Congressional District Young Women Leadership Program in 2013 when she was a part of the Virginia House of Delegates, taking it with her to Congress when she was elected to the House of Representatives in 2015.
The Congressional App Challenge (CAC) is a middle and high school student-based competition set to enhance to technology creativity and increase student participation in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields. The tournament allows students from across the country to compete against their peers by creating and promoting their smartphone and computer apps.
The bipartisan program at George Mason will allow girls to be exposed to different scenarios in federal government, public policy, and media. In the past, program participants have visited the U.S. Supreme Court, various news agencies, and have met with tech affiliates from Google and Facebook.