Business Women Awards 2022
Industry Leader Education Services Katharine Hazard Flynn, University of Rhode Island Business Engagement Center
After four decades as a business leader, Katharine Hazard Flynn is showing no signs of slowing down.
She currently serves dual roles at the University of Rhode Island in South Kingstown, overseeing the URI Business Engagement Center, as well as the URI Foundation & Alumni Engagement’s Corporate and Foundations unit.
Tying together her two positions, Hazard Flynn’s work focuses on fostering win-win partnerships between companies and the university.
“The best part about being here at the university is helping students, particularly helping students get really good, high-paying jobs, and then in turn giving back to the state that I love,” Hazard Flynn said.
In the corporate and foundations aspect of her job, Hazard Flynn has helped URI quadruple its fundraising activity since 2012.
“Katharine’s talent for networking and connecting faculty and staff at URI with funding opportunities is unparalleled,” said Pete Rumsey, chief business development officer at URI Research Foundation.
Her other role at the Business Engagement Center is as crucial. The center bills itself as a “front door” for the business community to connect with a variety of resources at URI. Small and large companies use its services to connect with students for internships, access help with technology or intellectual property transfer, and sponsor research, among other things.
Often after a good experience with the Business Engagement Center, a company will be inspired to make a donation to the university in the form of a scholarship or other type of gift, Hazard Flynn says.
She developed and launched the center in 2013. Tapped for the role by URI’s then-president David M. Dooley, she arrived at URI after serving as business development director at what is now known as R.I. Commerce Corp.
Before that, Hazard Flynn, an alumna of Brown University who grew up outside of Boston, spent about 20 years working on Wall Street. “I did some trading but worked mostly in sales,” Hazard Flynn said. “So that was sort of where my relationship-building activities started.”
She adds: “On Wall Street in the ’80s I was a pioneer. And one of probably very few women around every table I was around.”
When her children were young, “we decided that we didn’t want to have teenagers in Manhattan,” she said. So, she and her husband, Lawrence Flynn, moved to Rhode Island.
As inaugural director of the Business Engagement Center, Hazard Flynn has “improved the visibility of URI on a global scale,” according to Rumsey.
Rumsey points to Hazard Flynn’s role in mobilizing CEOs of large companies to support the state bond to build the URI Fascitelli Center for Advanced Engineering. “Without Katharine’s efforts to engage corporate supporters, this project may not have happened,” he said.
Supporting Rhode Island’s food economy, she developed the annual Rhode Island Food System Summit six years ago. As part of the annual event, government, academic, business and community come together to discuss how to make the state’s food system more sustainable, accessible and resilient.
Recently, Hazard Flynn has been focusing on initiatives related to growing and increasing the visibility of the state’s blue economy.
She has helped the URI Research Foundation become one of 60 finalists for the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge Program. If awarded funding, the university would develop ocean-related infrastructure and create an ocean innovation center. The winners will be announced in September.
“One thing I like about my job is the fact that, on any given day, I can talk to companies that work with shellfish to robotics and everything in between,” she said. “So it’s fun for me, and it keeps my mind active.”