Our Founder

For more than two decades, Maureen Gillick has been helping people figure out who they are and where they are going.

Many of those years were spent in a corporate environment helping executives to become better executives. One day she realized that these corporate executives, “older people” if you will, often had a hard time with change and easily fell back into old habits.

It was around that time that Maureen started working with younger folks, students in middle school and high school, as a volunteer for an innovative peer mentoring program in her community. She saw that these young people were much more open to having conversations about their futures and realized that her time might be better spent cultivating not only their skills, talents and interests, but their self-reliance, confidence, and ability to think for themselves.

It is with that idea in mind that Maureen founded PROJECT: LIFE.

Her corporate experience, which includes developing market strategies, extensive leadership training, facilitating change, and fostering proactive corporate partnerships, easily translates to the process of helping students clarify their goals while maximizing their educational opportunities. She uses many of the same tools to help them to develop their own strategies with the goal of “fostering proactive partnerships” with the right colleges and universities, and even afterwards with the right employers.

Maureen shares herself with her community in a number of ways:

• Author and creator of “Students as Visible Leaders: Making the Most of Today,” a program that focuses on the basic themes of building character, visible leadership, and citizenship in the school and community.
• Volunteer instructor for peer mentoring program.
• Guest lecturer on women in business and leadership at corporations and colleges.
• Keynote speaker for “Navigating the Road to College and the College Knowledge Series,” an ongoing community forum sponsored by Sylvan Learning Center.
• Member of a local school board and Co-Chair of Stonington High School’s School-Based Improvement Team, through which she was instrumental in the recruitment of school executives, administrators, and teaching staff and establishing long term strategic goals for individual schools.
• Graduate of Fordham University and member of the Alumni organization dedicated to helping current students navigate the recruitment process.
• Independent organizational development consultant/advisor for private institutions.
• Contributing member to Stonington Public School’s Superintendent’s Advisory Council
• Guest lecturer at RIGHT Annual Conference: a group cooperative for home schoolers