For her efforts to improve and support the lives and futures of these young women, Wadsworth has been selected by the Bowdoin College Board of Trustees to receive the 2026 Common Good Award.
Led by Wadsworth until her retirement in spring 2025 and informed by the work of the Buffalo Tanzania Education Project (BTEP), a university-community initiative of the University at Buffalo, the Girls Education Collaborative (GEC) began as a group of people who sought to explore the possibility of a partnership with the Immaculate Heart Sisters of Africa (IHSA) in Tanzania, who had a vision for how to transform a community through the power of girls’ education.
That group launched GEC as a nonprofit in January 2012 with Wadsworth at the helm. She formed an innovative partnership between IHSA and GEC and, via funding and project management, GEC helped build and open the Kitenga Girls Secondary School, playing a pivotal role in helping fulfill IHSA’s vision of building a school and creating opportunity for marginalized girls in rural Tanzania.
After more than a dozen years of Wadsworth’s stewardship, the school that began with fifty students has grown and evolved, its graduates greatly exceeding national norms as they continue in postsecondary educations. Now at 230 students, with a planned capacity for 320, the school continues to grow and evolve. The Anne Robinson Wadsworth Center for Collaboration was completed in 2021 as a place to facilitate the core values of collaboration and partnership. In 2022, the innovative regenerative farm Garden For The Future was started, not only to grow food for the school but to teach students about agricultural practices that heal the planet and arrest the pace of climate change.
The campus is powered by solar and sustainable water systems. Plans are underway to bring connectivity to campus and build a technology center so these students can fairly compete in our global world. The school stands as one example of how educating girls can advance developing economies and break cycles of generational poverty, childhood marriage, and destructive cultural practices such as female genital mutilation.
Based on the success of the GEC model, in 2020 Wadsworth also led GEC’s creation of the Ally Funder Alliance (AFA), a philanthropic model to accelerate the pace and volume of philanthropic funding and allyship directed toward community-born initiatives in girls’ education.
The AFA brings together a deliberately small group of like-minded funders to provide unrestricted funding and technical assistance to early stage, locally driven, girl-centered organizations. Today, this nascent collaborative has already helped five young Tanzanian organizations increase their outreach, strengthen systems, and grow their impact.
Wadsworth, who has a daughter who is a member of the Class of 2009, was an anthropology and sociology major at Bowdoin and later earned an executive master’s in public administration at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She served as president of the board for the East Aurora School District; helped launch the Enterprise Charter School in Buffalo, New York; served as a trustee for Buffalo Seminary, an all-girls secondary school; and has lobbied on Capitol Hill for public education.
About the Common Good Award
Established in 1994 during the Bowdoin College Bicentennial, the Common Good Award honors those alumni who have demonstrated an extraordinary, profound, and sustained commitment to the common good, in the interest of society, with conspicuous disregard for personal gain in wealth or status.
Common Good Award recipients personify the idea of the common good as set forth by Bowdoin’s first president, Joseph McKeen. In his inaugural address on September 2, 1802, McKeen reminded his audience, “It ought always to be remembered that literary institutions are founded and endowed for the common good and not for the private advantage of those who resort to them for education. It is not that they may be able to pass through life in an easy and reputable manner, but that their mental powers may be cultivated and improved for the benefit of society.”
The Common Good Award will be presented Saturday, May 30, 2026, during Reunion Convocation. Registration for Reunion Weekend 2026 (May 28–31) begins in March.
