Master’s Student Receives 2026 Helene M. Overly Scholarship

Since 1981, the Women’s Transportation Seminar, an international organization supporting professional advancement of women in transportation, has awarded the Helene M. Overly Memorial Scholarship to women pursuing graduate studies in transportation and other related fields. This year, Eastern is proud to announce that Florence Osei has been named a 2026 Helene M. Overly scholarship recipient.

Osei is a second-year graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in urban and regional planning. She says she’s long been interested in advancing transportation equity, accessibility and safety in Cheney, Spokane and beyond.

“The scholarship has been both affirming and inspiring to me and to my education” Osei says. “It has reinforced my passion for transportation.” Osei, who grew up in Ghana, has both seen and experienced the ways in which equitable and accessible transportation systems can make or break a community.

“We plan to make sure that these systems are accessible; regardless of your status, your community or where you’re from, you are being considered,” Osei says of the professional work she hopes to pursue.  Osei added that she is confident her unique experience and insight as both a woman and an international student will help others bridge the gap.

“Being an international student and then winning the scholarship, it really affirms that my work at Eastern is on the right path; that my voice and my work is being valued.” Says Osei, who is currently working on her thesis project with Matt Anderson, previous director of EWU’s Urban and Regional Planning Program. Though Osei’s thesis is primarily focused on housing, she says she was surprised to see how closely the issues of accessibility and equity in housing tie into that of transportation.

Osei said that working with Anderson on the Point-in-Time Count — the federally mandated annual census of individuals experiencing homelessness — helped her to realize that many unhoused people in the greater Spokane area were most concerned with obtaining a bus pass. “Mobility shapes our access to opportunities,” Osei says, adding that gentrification and price-fixing are pushing the people who need accessible transportation the further away from it.

“Thank you to EWU for giving us [international students] the opportunity to have hands-on experience,” she says. “Being able to transition whatever we learn here to the real-world affirms that, though we’re from a different world, we’re a part of this one now.”

**Story by Rachel Weinberg.