Erica O’Mahony is a Spanish teacher at the high school, where she has taught since 2018. Last year, O’Mahony became the faculty liaison for the Brookline Innovation Fund, a nonprofit organization that raises private funds to help develop new programs at the high school that are not funded by the Brookline school district.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Describe your new role with the Innovation Fund.
“For the Innovation Fund, I am the faculty liaison. The Innovation Fund is essentially an incubator; we expect some things to fail. It’s an experiment where teachers get to experiment with new programs that other districts don’t get to. My role is to be the liaison between the parent volunteers who donate and the teachers who have ideas for new programs. I have to help decide which programs get funded. We look at whether it’s feasible and whether it’s innovative and if the district can’t pay. I work with the programs as they continue on to assess their progress.”
What made you want to take on the role of Innovation Fund Faculty Liaison?
“I just really love our school. I love people. I know a lot of parents and people in the parent community, so I find it really energizing, and I wanted to get to know more of BHS than I currently do. I get really excited by Roger Grande, for example, doing several initiatives on climate change, or the Queer Student Program. I want to be able to help create new programs like that and know what my colleagues are working on outside of the World Language department. I’ve started to get to know so many people, and I think BHS is full of amazing, innovative teachers.”
Have you worked with the Innovation Fund before on any specific projects?
“Astrid Allen, who’s my very close friend, was the faculty liaison for seven years. Then, Brit [Stevens] took it over. I worked on a project with Dean Allen over the summer that the fund founded called the Summer Summit after Covid, where we collectively paused and came up with ideas and takeaways from remote learning, asking ourselves, ‘What do we want to do?’, so I mostly know about the Fund from Dean Allen and Brit.”
What do you hope to accomplish in this new role?
“I’m really excited by all of the projects, and I wish I could help them all get funded. There’s potentially a course about belonging and friendships, there’s a criminal justice course, there’s an outdoor garden initiative that would bring hope and action to students around climate change where students would be climate ambassadors. There’s a proposal on how to help students use AI responsibly and for good, and there’s another one where the librarians are working on educating students on misinformation and how to teach students to get accurate information. So I hope to help all of those projects and the students they would support.”
