FEBRUARY 26, 2026 –10:23 AM

The Rancho Santa Fe Women’s Fund held its February business lunch meeting on Feb. 10 at Lomas Santa Fe Country Club. This annual meeting gives the organization’s members the opportunity to become directly involved with the late stage diligence process for this year’s grant applicants.

Grant committee co-chairs Sara Bennett and Maritia Walper presented the outcomes from the second round of the Women’s Fund’s diligence process. In the first round The Women’s Fund received Letters of Intent from 151 local nonprofits each outlining its program in this year’s focus areas, namely health services or social services.

In the first round the total ask was $7.1 million. From these worthy projects the grant committees, led by Bennett and Walper, winnowed the projects to 47 and requested the applicants to provide detailed budgetary and other information about their proposed projects, management and finances. At the end of the second round of diligence the projects and applicants numbered 20 organizations, according to a news release.

At the meeting Walper and Bennett provided an overview of each organization and its proposed project, and presented the schedule for the third and last phase of the diligence review, namely the site visits. Online signups for the site visits went live at the meeting. The site visits will take place throughout the month of March. The membership will meet again in April to vote on the outcomes. The final meeting of the year will take place in May where the grant award checks will be presented to the winning organizations and projects. The Rancho Santa Fe Women’s Fund expects to grant over $500,000 this season, the news release stated.

The meeting also featured a speaker on a selected topic of interest to the membership: artificial intelligence. The speaker was esteemed professor Dr. Henrik Christensen, from the Jacob School of Engineering at UCSD. He is a researcher, venture capitalist and consultant to industry and governmental entitles. Among other titles, Christensen holds the Qualcomm Chancellor’s chair in Robot Systems at UCSD. He is also the director of the Contextual Robotics Institute and of the Cognitive Robotics Laboratory, the news release stated.

Autonomous vehicle technologies are a particular focus of his research, and the membership was interested to learn about the innovations that the Christensen lab has brought to the university in the forms of self‑driving/self‑repositioning scooters for students and autonomous campus-wide mail delivery, according to the news release.

Christensen shared practical advice for embracing AI in people’s everyday lives. Drawing on his expertise as an entrepreneur, industry leader and investor he opined on the products and innovations that can be expected in the near term, including in engineering and health care.

He also gave advice for parents to pass on to young people planning careers in the AI age. One important theme was that AI will be an aspect of every field and feature of everyone’s lives. He recommended students to pursue traditional fields or majors of interest to them and be ready to embrace all the ways that AI will transform their careers, the news release stated.