This featured guest piece is an excerpt of our March 2026 newsletter.

Dear MCSW Community:

It is an honor to be writing to you during Women’s History Month of March 2026.  Hailing from Framingham in Middlesex County, I was recently appointed to the Commission by Senate President Karen Spilka in November of 2025.

As a veteran educator, I’ve dedicated over 25 years to young women’s education and leadership, believing wholeheartedly that when we empower women to speak out and stand up, we help to create a more just, inclusive and loving society. As I often tell my students, when you uplift a woman, the entire community around her serves to benefit. How do we do this? Research shows that investing in women’s education and leadership provides one of the highest returns on investment for global development, increasing their individual earnings potential by up to 20% per year of schooling, while boosting national GDPs. Moreover, educated women create a ripple effect, leading to healthier families, reduced child mortality, and delayed, more sustainable family planning. This realization has fueled my passion for teaching, activism and advocacy for over two decades now.

Prior to joining the State Commission, I served for five years as a regional commissioner on the MetroWest Commission on the Status of Women (MWCSW) and as its chair for three years. While there are many initiatives that I participated in during my tenure at the MWCSW, I am most proud of the work I did to help create the MWCSW’s Athena Council, an application-based girls’ advocacy and mentoring organization that empowers teen girls from all over the Metrowest to inform and advise commissioners about the challenges facing adolescent girls in the MetroWest region and beyond. Though still in its early years, the Athena Council has worked to address a variety of issues, ranging from period poverty to mental health challenges both in the home and at school, career building and entrepreneurship to redefining feminism in the 21^st century. Their work has been shared with community partners, legislators, parents and educators in all manner of settings, from ice cream socials and health fairs to online listening circles and the State House.

As a long-time women’s advocate, a teacher of young girls and a mother to two daughters, I believe it is important to not only invest financially in the future of young women and girls, but to invest our time and talents in sharing what we know with this next generation of leaders. That’s why I’m honored to share so many upcoming opportunities that the MCSW has designed in an effort to inspire our younger sisters to get involved. Coming up on Thursday, April 23, is the Commission’s 2026 Girls Empowerment Leadership Initiative Summit (GELI), taking place this year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The MCSW GELI programming will offer girls from all over the state an opportunity to learn new leadership skills, develop connections, build alliances for advocating for girls’ issues and concerns, and promote girl leadership throughout the Commonwealth. I and my fellow sister commissioners are excited about the prospect of engaging more closely with our state’s emerging leaders and nurturing this leadership pipeline to ensure that our state’s long legacy of women advocating for women continues well into the future.

But your participation doesn’t have to stop there. The 2026 campaign theme for International Women’s Day is “Give to Gain,” and in step with that idea, I urge each one of us to consider giving to the MCSW so that we can continue to amplify the voices of all of our sisters and empower women and girls throughout the Commonwealth to “be the change they wish to see in the world.” 

If you or the organization you belong to would like to make a difference in the lives of women and girls in Massachusetts, please make a financial contribution to the MCSW Trust Fund, attend a regional or state-sponsored listening circle, panel discussion or event.

In the words of one of my heroes—Gloria Steinem— it’s time to stop “think[ing] about making women fit in the world…but making the world fit women.”

In Solidarity,
Heather Panahi
MCSW State Commissioner

Heather Panahi was appointed to the Commission by Senate President Karen Spilka in November of 2025. A veteran educator with a Master of Arts in Social Studies Education, she has spent over 25 years dedicated to young women’s education and leadership. Her work as a teacher at an all-girls’ institution has resulted in many opportunities, including building and coaching a nationally-ranked all-girls Model United Nations team, training students to work in local polling stations, facilitating social justice-focused, immersive student travel experiences to South Africa and Morocco, and co-creating SISTERS, a program that seeks to build meaningful international collaborative partnerships between female students in the U.S. and South Africa, as participants explore together the challenges and successes of women and girls globally.

In 2010, she was selected to serve as an educational representative of the US Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ TEA-IREX program. In this role, she traveled to Ghana to share teaching strategies and best pedagogical practices with West African educators. She has also traveled to Hangzhou, China and Tokyo, Japan to work with educators in curriculum development. In 2017, she was the recipient of her school’s prestigious Rhinehart Faculty Chair for the Humanities. Ms. Panahi is a lifelong women’s activist and advocate. For five years, she served as a commissioner on the MetroWest Commission on the Status of Women, where she helped to create the MWCSW’s Athena Council, an organization made up of teen girls, who help to inform and advise the Metrowest Commission about the challenges facing adolescent girls in the MetroWest region. She is also the co-founder of Books, Beats and Brushes—an English language, arts and music program for refugee women and their children. Ms. Panahi is a published author and an aspiring photographer.