NSBE Members and Friends,
Our 2024–2025 fiscal year was a time of continuing success and rising opposition for the National Society of Black Engineers.
As NSBE’s total membership surged to a 10-year high of nearly 26,000, U.S. colleges and universities scrambled to align their admission, recruitment and hiring policies with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action in higher education.
State-level “anti-woke” legislation moved backstage, and federal executive orders sought to delete diversity, equity and inclusion programs and DEI language nationwide, as we joyously celebrated NSBE’s 50th anniversary. More than 15,000 participants turned out for our 2025 Annual Convention, in Chicago, which featured NSBE’s Legacy Museum of artifacts and living history from the Society’s five decades. Our Founder’s Day events at Purdue University included an unforgettable symbolic and literal passing of the torch to a new generation of STEM leaders. And our hardcover publication titled “NSBE Gold” captured highlights of our “Five Decades of Black Excellence Engineered.”
Programs and whole federal agencies devoted to STEM education, or to providing the STEM data critical to measurement of NSBE’s progress, were downsized or defunded, as NSBE far exceeded our goals for fundraising and partnership development in several key categories.
Skillful, strategic leadership by NSBE’s executive boards and World Headquarters executive staff, as well as thoughtful, nimble governance by NSBE’s senators, made all these successes possible, but they were hardly the only areas where NSBE advanced.
Our Collegiate leaders and Professional members boosted their knowledge and honed their skills in artificial intelligence at our National Leadership Conference and at the record-breaking NSBE Professional Development Conference, thanks to NSBE’s partnership with Microsoft and Amazon — step 1 in our plan to maintain our Society’s role as a transformational organization in the era of AI.
Our 19-year push to move greater numbers of Black children toward fulfilling STEM careers received another major boost, with a $1.2-million gift to NSBE’s Summer Engineering Experience for Kids (NSBE SEEK).
Members of our National Executive Board, National Advisory Board and World Headquarters staff came together to begin designing the new strategic plan that will further NSBE’s mission through 2029.
Moreover, we strengthened the foundation, redefined the legacy of change and community empowerment and retained the identity and name of the National Society of Black Engineers. And we maintained NSBE as a harbor, a place of convening and a home, for the nurturance of Black STEM talent around the globe.
We did all of this, in a time of large-scale disruption — NSBE’s engineers and technologists working in concert with our partners and allies — utilizing the creativity we were born with and then were trained to maximize with STEM, and employing our passion for excellence and our commitment to continually realize the vision of equity put forth by NSBE’s founders in 1975.
You’ll find the evidence in the pages that follow: NSBE is actively building a better tomorrow, for our membership of students and professionals, for the nation where we were founded and for underserved Black communities in the U.S. and around the world.
And today, at the dawn of our second half-century, NSBE is just getting started.
Sincerely yours,
Chika Okwor
2025–2026 National Chair, NSBE
Taylor Scott
2024–2025 National Chair, NSBE
Janeen Uzzell
Chief Executive Officer, NSBE
