Corporate and Non-Profit Executive, Stacey D. Stewart Launches SportsMom Foundation to Support Girl Student-Athletes

WASHINGTON, Dec. 13, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Stacey D. Stewart announced the launch of the SportsMom Foundation, a national non-profit 501(c) 3 dedicated to helping girl athletes prepare for academic and athletic careers in college.

For more than 25 years, Stacey has been a highly respected corporate and non-profit leader - having worked as an investment banker on Wall Street, corporate director at PennyMac, and chief executive at the Fannie Mae Foundation and United Way of America. Currently, Stacey is the president and CEO of March of Dimes, a $200 million foundation dedicated to maternal and infant health.

As founder, president and board chair of the SportsMom Foundation, Stacey is leading a new effort and is joined on the Board by Tamika Dudley, Head Coach of Girls Basketball, Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, Chad Ricardo, the voice of high school sports in the Washington, DC area and the host of Hi-Def High School on ABC-7, Fred Reynolds III, Assistant Director of Compliance, American University and Dana Hollish Hill, real estate entrepreneur and coach, JPAR Stellar Living, and mother to Parker Hill, a freshman forward for Princeton University Girls Basketball. See https://youtu.be/2vbJ-XZmGtQ Stacey and board member Chad Ricardo's recent interview on SportsMom Foundation's launch.

Early financial supporters of the foundation include Washington, DC attorney Beth Wilkinson, business executives Kimberly Johnson and Pinkie Mayfield, with corporate support from Cover Communications, a public and media relations firm.

"The SportsMom Foundation marries three elements I'm most passionate about – sports, scholarship, and sisterhood," said Stacey D. Stewart. "We know when supported, girl athletes not only do well but excel in the classroom and on the court. We created the foundation to provide financial support to girls and their families to help offset club fees, offer academic tutoring, athletic conditioning and training and mentorship to girls on how to build a more strategic and effective social media brand to attract college coaches and recruiters." 

The idea of the foundation started in 2018 on Stacey's smartphone, where she would snap photos and take video clips of her daughters playing competitive high school volleyball and lacrosse and post the pictures under the alias "SportsMomDMV." In a matter of months, the photos and her alias went viral across the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia high school sports community. To date, Stacey has taken nearly 5,000 images of girl athletes in competition at local and national high school-level games and tournaments.  This platform has evolved into a way to address the gender and racial inequity in high school and college sports. Today far fewer women than men are NCAA athletes and, among all the female NCAA athletes, 70% are white, 9% are African American, 6% are Hispanic and 2% are Asian.

"Stacey's passion for supporting girl athletes is unlike anything I have ever seen," said Chad Ricardo, a SportsMom Foundation board member. "Because of her commitment and creativity, Stacey has used her platform as a sports photographer not only to address the inequities we see in girls' sports but to help prepare these young women to be champions on the court and in life."

To learn more about the SportsMom Foundation and support their work and girl athletes, visit www.sportsmom.org.

SOURCE SportsMom Foundation