(NEA) for "Architectural Quality in Urban Homesteading," a project with a stated aim to help urban homesteaders, many of whom where women, "achieve architectural quality in buildings rehabilitated and cooperatively owned and managed by homesteaders through a participatory design process." WSPA programming focused on reforming the design professions to include women. Courses like "Demystification of Tools in Relation to Design" taught by Katrin Adam, emphasized practical skills, and courses such as "Women and the Built Environment: Personal, Social, and Professional Perceptions," taught by Ms. Birkby and others, encouraging women to consider broader issues of significance to women in built and symbolic environments. The participants who brought children to the two-week program where provided with childcare arranged through a work study program on each campus. A 1983 essay The Women's School of Planning and Architecture in "Learning Our Way: Essays in Feminist Education"(1985), ed. Charlotte Bunch and Sandra Pollack (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press), authored by Leslie Kanes Weisman, describes the Women's School of Planning and Architecture as an ideal product of its time for "the consciousness-raising task of defining problems." Although WSPA was short lived, the school was able to facilitate lasting effects. Participants organized themselves into sustainable professional networks and continued to advocate for issues relevant to professional women in general, as well as the movement to include more women in the architecture and design professions. Later life and legacy As the feminist movement began to wane, in the late 1970s, Ms. Birkby's focused on teaching and feminist architecture studies and conferences. The Women's School of Planning and Architecture closed and Ms. Birkby went on to teach architecture at Long Island and CUNY in New York. She was a member and held conferences for the Organization of Lesbian and Gay Architects and Designers in NY (OLGAD). In 1992 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. A memorial and exhibit of her work was organized by OLGAD members and held at Kate Millett's loft in NYC, attended by most of the seminal East Coast lesbian feminists. In the final stage of illness, Ms. Birkby was cared for by a friends who called themselves the "Sisters of Birkby." On April 13, 1994, Ms. Birkby died in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. A memorial to Noel Phyllis Birkby at Orient Cemetery, Suffolk County, New York reads Courage. Following Ms. Birkby's death in 1994, Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, hosted a two-day exhibition, entitled "'Amazonian Activity':