Lauren Mondschein and Emma Neary
YWCA Greenwich will be holding its 5th Annual Women Who Inspire Awards to recognize exceptional women in our community. YWCA Greenwich’s Women Who Inspire Awards was established to recognize and celebrate outstanding women who have excelled in philanthropic, professional, and volunteer pursuits. Importantly, these honorees have enriched the lives of many in our community. This event acknowledges the changes in society that have led to the fluidity of work/life pursuits for women of today.
Lauren Mondschein
Lauren Mondschein, a senior at Greenwich High School, is an Executive Board Member of the First Selectman’s Youth Commission (FSYC), a group of students dedicated to addressing youth concerns in the Greenwich community. Through FSYC, Lauren served as a facilitator of the 2022 Greenwich Student Diversity Leadership Conference, where youth address issues of equality, justice, and allyship. For the 2022-2023 school year, Lauren is developing Conscious Coping, an FSYC project for high school students to learn strategies to cope with depression, anxiety, toxic thought processes, and overall social or academic stressors of living in a high-pressure environment.
Lauren is on the executive board of Generation Impact. Lauren has served as the Events Chair and planned four philanthropic Big Events. Lauren is the Greenwich High School Membership Chair and recruits and motivate its 100 members to attend events and lead grant reviews.
Lauren is a leader of the student-run non-profit RAMPKids, an organization dedicated to fighting childhood hunger in Appalachia. Yearly, she participates in a service trip to Martin County, Kentucky, where approximately 37% of the population lives below the poverty level. There she distributes fresh produce in a food pantry and performs community service in the homes of the families in the program
Emma Neary
Emma is currently a senior at Sacred Heart Greenwich, CT.
Emma has been deeply involved in community organizations since early middle school, specifically the Leukemia Lymphoma Society and Backyard Sports working with special needs children. In February of this year, Emma was nominated as a candidate for Student of the Year for the Leukemia Lymphoma Society whereby she created a multigenerational team calling it Hearts for a Cure and in a 7-week time frame set out to create a fundraising strategy to reach a goal of over $100,000 and along the way provide community education and awareness about blood cancers and the work of LLS. Emma not only surpassed her goal but broke a record in Fairfield County and came in 3rd place raising $112,000. These funds allowed her to directly donate to two major research grants supporting Acute Myeloid Leukemia / Myelodysplastic Syndromes in honor of her grandmother and to the LLS Children’s Cancer Initiative.
Losing her grandmother to cancer and seeing many other family members and friends impacted by cancer drove Emma to fundraise, bring others on to her team and educate the greater community about the work that LLS does.
For fun Emma loves to play soccer and is captain of the Varsity B team at Sacred Heart and is a Peer Leader to freshman students, she loves good food and traveling with family and friends!