Equity and Resilience

Experience the Event

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Join YoungND for a virtual Notre Dame Leaders speaker series event, “Equity and Resilience” on Monday, October 27, 2025 at 7:00 p.m. ET for a dynamic conversation with 2025 Domer Dozen Honorees about reimagining justice and resilience through innovation.

☘️Kaleigh Yost ‘15, leading research to improve infrastructure and community resilience to natural hazards
☘️Linde Hoffman ‘20, safely and sustainably shrinking the criminal justice system
☘️Anna Benedict ‘21, fighting mental health stigma through the power of storytelling

Meet the Speaker: Anna Benedict '21

Anna Benedict ’21 graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2021, having double-majored in Neuroscience and Behavior (B.S.) and English with an honors concentration in Creative Writing. As a student, she was a Trustey Merit and Glynn Scholar, cum laude graduate, researcher in two psychology labs, and winner of four English department awards—including top creative writer in her class. Since then, her work has focused on the intersection of storytelling, advocacy, and mental health.

Filling a need for connection brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, as a senior Anna founded the Our Stories Project (OSP), which draws from her unique interdisciplinary skillset and partners university students with adults with serious mental illness (SMI) at Clubhouse psychosocial recovery centers to co-write Clubhouse members’ life stories and publish them in a book. 

Anna has led the project three times so far. OSP has educated future healthcare leaders, built allyships with and empowered a vulnerable community, and fought stigma around SMI through three published books of lived narratives. The project has impacted nearly 200 students and Clubhouse members; the books have reached hundreds, raised thousands for Clubhouse communities, received international translation requests, and been used in graduate courses. The Clubhouse in South Bend is adapting stories from the book into a play for educational use to fight stigma around SMI. Anna is currently developing OSP into a curriculum for global use, in collaboration with Clubhouse International.

Now a Clinical Psychology PhD student at Michigan State University, Anna has turned OSP into the foundation of her academic career. She researches narrative identity and resilience in people with SMI, particularly psychosis, and is completing a Community Engagement Certificate. Driven by a deep valuing of every person’s humanity, her work centers on strengths-based recovery and addresses epistemic injustices by including own-voices narratives in mixed-methods (quantitative and qualitative) research. In her first year alone, she was accepted to present at three international conferences. Anna hopes to continue melding her creative, academic, and advocacy worlds, lifting the voices of those marginalized by serious mental illness and socioeconomic hardship to build more effective, whole-person-oriented approaches to mental healthcare.

Meet the Speaker: Linde Hoffman '20

Linde Hoffman ‘20 is a State Engagement Manager at Recidiviz, a nonprofit tech company spun out of Google that is aimed at safely and sustainably shrinking the criminal justice system. Linde’s passion for criminal justice reform began at the Center for Social Concerns, through which she participated in the Inside-Out cohort of Fall 2017. The CSC seminar took place in Westville Correctional Facility and combined undergraduates with justice-impacted individuals, who spent time together in class each week learning how to “Rethink Crime and Justice.” She has never gone a day without thinking about the friendships she formed during that seminar.

Before Recidiviz, she worked at the Center for Innovations in Community Safety at Georgetown Law, helping to develop and implement a police training program aimed at preventing unnecessary use of force and promoting officer health and wellness. Her first year post-grad, she completed a year of service with Amate House in Chicago, where she served as a reentry case manager and instructor in the women’s division of Cook County Jail in Chicago. 

Her favorite experiences at Notre Dame revolved around football, Lewis Hall, or Student Government, where she was Chief of Staff for the Boyle-McGuire administration. She holds a B.A. in Political Science and Spanish, magna cum laude, and is currently a part-time Master of Public Policy student at Georgetown University.

Meet the Speaker: Kaleigh Yost '15

Dr. Kaleigh Yost ’15 is the L. Robert and Mary L. Kimball Early Career Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. As a geotechnical engineer, her work aims to improve infrastructure and community resilience to increasingly frequent and severe natural hazards. 

Kaleigh is leading research to improve flood resilience in rural, underserved communities in Pennsylvania. She is developing innovative methods to better characterize levee systems and visualize how they perform during flood events. She is also studying converging multi-hazards, including sea level rise, coastal storms, and earthquakes that threaten large regions like the Pacific Rim. 

Committed to professional service, Kaleigh serves as co-chair for the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) Public Policy and Advocacy Committee and as a mentor for ARISE-US, a private sector alliance for disaster resilient societies created by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. She was the recipient of the 2025 EERI Younger Member Award and was elected to serve on the board of the United States Universities Council on Geotechnical Education and Research.

Kaleigh received her Ph.D. from Virginia Tech, her M.S. from the University of Texas at Austin, and her B.S. from the University of Notre Dame. At Notre Dame, she received the Reverend Thomas A. Steiner, C.S.C. award for all around excellence as a graduating senior in the College of Engineering.

Kaleigh and her husband welcomed their first child, Riley, in April 2025.