Buffalo, NY - Each night before bed, sisters Isabelle and Genevieve Stoute pray together with their mom and dad, and reflect on something for which they are grateful.
Cotton candy and unicorns are often among their charming answers. So when the girls expressed their gratitude for school one recent evening, Alison and Steve Stoute were delighted to hear such a grown-up response from their kindergartner and first-grader.
“They hear Steve and I talk a lot about the value of education, so it is sweet to know that they are becoming more mindful of it,” Alison says.
Canisus’ new first lady plans to speak a lot about the value of education and, more specifically higher education, as she introduces herself to the Western New York community. It is a subject matter she is wholly familiar with and the foundation upon which Alison Stoute built her career.
“I realized relatively early on that helping students harness the opportunities higher education provides is the place where my passion lies,” notes Stoute, whose educational and professional paths parallel that of her husband’s in many ways.
An outside hitter for the Marietta College volleyball team, Alison Stoute’s student-athlete experience led to aspirations of a career in higher education, “namely as a college coach.” So, after she earned her undergraduate degree in mathematics from Ohio’s liberal arts school, Stoute had an opportunity to coach at Michigan’s Grand Valley State University and pursued her master’s degree in higher education.
Winning games was fun but Stoute found her greatest fulfillment in assisting student-athletes succeed off the court. And therein began a succession of professional experiences at higher education institutions across the country, which enabled Alison Stoute “to empower students to find their passions and become their best selves.”
At Coastal Carolina University in Conway, SC, she developed and implemented student-athlete support programs in the areas of academics, leadership and civic engagement. At North Carolina State University, Stoute designed and instructed senior-level career preparation courses, and created individualized academic support plans for student-athletes.
It was around this time (2008) that she and Steve met at the NCAA national office in Indianapolis, IN. Both were preparing to facilitate an NCAA leadership conference in San Diego, CA. Alison represented the Wolfpack; Steve the Princeton Tigers. The pair stayed in contact post-conference but it would be several years before they reconnected in person and several more before they married, in 2014.
“We were just never in the same geographic location because of our jobs,” Alison explains.
The long-distance friendship-turned-relationship enabled each to concentrate on their respective careers. Steve headed to law school at the University of Pennsylvania. Alison pursued increasingly progressive roles under the academic umbrella.
From advising to retention, admissions to recruitment, she worked to positively affect the trajectory of countless undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students at such universities as Georgia Southern, Drexel and Northwestern.
Stoute was at Northwestern, managing the university’s nationally-ranked doctoral program in economics, when Canisius announced the appointment of Steve Stoute as the college’s 25th president thereby making her first lady.
Stoute has since embraced the role fully, pulling on her past professional experiences to help define her new position as the partner to the president and – perhaps more so – the symbolic mother to Canisius University’s student body.
“My plan is to be as present as possible on campus so that I can continue to help students embrace all their unique abilities so that they may have the best outcomes.”
