Last winter, a group of New York City alumnae lugged their laptops through the snow to midtown Manhattan to answer inquiries about the movie Transformers and how iPhones are hardwired. They’d convened for a community service event sponsored by the local alumnae club: a two-hour stint answering letters from prison inmates across the country.

Most of the 2.2 million inmates in the United States have no access to the internet; when they want information, Googling isn’t an option. So they send letters to a special team of librarians at the New York Public Library. Each year, NYPL Correctional Services Program staff and volunteers field around 2,000 letters. For decades, New York’s program was one-of-a-kind. Now, similar initiatives have started in San Francisco and Houston.

Jess Planos Sirizzotti ’10, LGBTQ events chair for the New York Wellesley Club, has volunteered with the local program since 2015. She thought a letter-answering event would be a great chance for alumnae to put their Wellesley-honed research skills to good use while coming together to support a great cause. So, she picked up cookies from a local bakery and trudged through the snowstorm to meet fellow alumnae in a conference room at an office building near the library’s main branch.

“We were basically human Google,” says Planos Sirizzotti, who’s answered nearly 200 letters, most from her apartment, after receiving scans from librarians. She’s answered questions about Dungeons & Dragons and guitar tabs. After the letter writing night, a few alumnae wanted to stay involved, “which I think is the mark of a good event,” says Planos Sirizzotti.