From empowering and educating young girls to preserving the oral histories of women over 75, Brenda Brown Rever has helped shape women’s stories and been shaped by them in return. After graduating from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1965, Rever maintained close ties with the school, serving as a trustee from 1994–2007, a vice chair of their $450 million capital campaign, and recently becoming trustee emerita. A trustee of House of Ruth, a non-sectarian safe house where she chaired a $20 million campaign, Rever founded CHANA (the Counseling, Helpline, and Network for Abused Women) in Baltimore in 1994, the first and only kosher safe house and helpline for Jewish women. She was a founding board member of the Jewish Women’s Archive and was instrumental in creating Weaving Women’s Words: Baltimore Stories, an oral history project recording the stories of Jewish women with diversified lives. She has also been Chair of the Women’s Department of Baltimore Jewish Federation, and then National Chair of the women’s division for Council of Jewish Federations. She turned her attention to empowering girls in 2009, when she founded the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, a college preparatory charter school that now serves more than 500 young women. Among her many honors, Rever has been inducted into the Jewish Hall of Fame and received the Hannah G. Solomon Award from the National Council of Jewish Women, the Golda Meir Award, and named one of the top 100 Women in Baltimore.