KATE SMITH-STOTT.

Kate is a graduate of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas and has made a career of helping people. She worked for many years with special needs children and adults. Upon moving to the most beautiful state in the union, she was the hospital Administrator for both Raleigh Hills Hospital working with detox patients and later as Administrator for Riverside Psychiatric Hospital. From that experience, she accepted a position as Vice-President of Behavioral Health Holladay Park Hospital. After 20 years of working with behavioral health sciences, she made a career change and put her experiences to work as an Organizational Development Consultant for Legacy Health Systems and later for PacifiCorp and PGE (Portland General Electric). Her work consisted of consultation with managers in designing more efficient work systems delivering management training programs to high profile managers and soft skills training to employees. In 2006 she fulfilled a life-time dream of traveling to Africa by volunteering with Watoto wa Dunia (Children of the World), a Portland based organization dedicated to development work in Kenya. Their focus was building a school for children orphaned by aids in Kisiyani and maintaining a school in Kibera (a slum of over 800,00 people in the middle of downtown Nairobi). It turned out to be a life changing experience made even richer by the development of a friendship with a nineteen-year-old young man who desperately wanted to go to college and a young, widowed mother of four. Kate subsequently made two additional trips to Kenya to visit these two families and has remained in weekly e-mail contact with them for the past 13 years. She has many colorful stories to tell of her adventures in Kenya and her admiration for its people.