The Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mount Holyoke College President Lynn Pasquerella has invited Sandy Rosenthal founder of the flood protection advocacy group Levees.org to attend the launch of The Women in Public Service Project and Colloquium in Washington DC next month.

The 4-hour colloquium will take place at the U.S. Department of State on December 15, 2011 followed by lunch and a program at the John F. Kennedy Center to discuss how the legacy of leadership at Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Mount Holyoke, Smith and Wellesley Colleges can inspire women in public service worldwide.

This initiative is aimed at preparing a new generation of women leaders from around the world for success in public service, politics, and government, and will host a series of training institutes starting this summer at Wellesley.

The opening hours of the December 15 Colloquium will feature speakers including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of both The Daily Beast and Newsweek; Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund; Farah Pandith, the State Department’s Special Representative to Muslim Communities; Melanne Verveer, Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues; and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. MHC student Chiedza Mufunde ’12 will be featured on a panel entitled “A Dialogue Among Generations”. She will be joined by panelists Rear Admiral Sandra L. Stosz, U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Gloria Steinem, and emerging public leaders from Indonesia, Panama and the NEA region. The panel will be moderated by Claire Shipman, ABC news White House correspondent.

The Colloquium will be webcast between 10:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. Eastern. To see the webcast, click here. For the full schedule for the webcast, click here.