Category: Winter 2022

Nicholas Gann ’12 graduated from Kalamazoo College in the wreckage of the Great Recession. With his B.A. in political science, Gann would have loved to have gone on to D.C. to start his career. Yet coming from a middle-class family with two parents who were teachers, there was no way he could manage an unpaid internship there, which is the route most folks take.

“In our family, we say there’s no shame in paying your bills on time, so I did all sorts of odd jobs after college, stringing paychecks together,” Gann said. “I substitute taught in Detroit. I sold cars. I kept thinking I was going to save some money and then I’d know when an opportunity presented itself.”

Fortunately, opportunities would eventually present themselves to Gann that would take him from the forests of Northern Michigan to the big sky of Montana, then to blustery Chicago, and finally back west to the Grand Tetons of Wyoming—where he’s been the Strategic Partnerships Manager for the Wyoming Office of Tourism since October 2019.

All along Gann’s serpentine career path, he credits his liberal arts education from K for being able to learn as much about himself as he did about other people, by being open to different experiences, learning about the context of people’s situations and thinking critically.

“That trajectory of promoting curiosity, independent thought, and meeting people where they are was started by my parents, grew at K, and developed from there,” Gann said. 

Gann’s parents were teachers who lived and worked overseas for nearly 15 years—in countries ranging from Belgium, United Kingdom, Denmark, Turkey, West Germany, the Soviet Union, Nepal and Pakistan—before settling down in Northern Michigan. Their household was filled with books and conversations and questions. 

“They would have these pretty incredible stories,” Gann said. “They had an inherent curiosity about how people do things, about different cultures and religions. I think when you grow up in a household like that, you also develop this sort of curious mind.”

In high school, that curiosity inspired Gann to study abroad for a year in Germany, an experience he cherished, and one that led him to K.

“When it was time to start looking at colleges, K’s study abroad program was a natural fit for me,” Gann said. 

Gann’s six-month study abroad at K would also bring him back to Germany, to the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Bavaria. This time the program required him to do an internship that showed some cultural relevance, so he stuck with his roots in bucolic Northern Michigan. 

“I actually did my internship with the Bavarian Forestry Service, which was pretty wild,” Gann said. “I’d be out hunting or planting trees with my supervisor in the morning, and then get dropped off at class kind of sweaty and covered in dirt wearing my red long johns, wool pants and suspenders—much to the curiosity of order-driven Germans.”

In addition to being able to both pursue his studies and indulge in his favorite childhood pastimes, Gann also had a great time there with his first roommate at K, Nathan Gilmour ’12.

“We met each other on study abroad in high school, and then we just kept in contact,” Gann said. “Nathan applied to Kalamazoo College, too; we decided to be roommates freshman year and then we went back to Germany together.” 

Gann’s internship with the Bavarian Forestry Service was in the back of his mind when, after about a year of doing odd jobs, another friend of his from K, Zach Holden ’12, told him about an internship he was doing in Montana for Project Vote Smart (now Vote Smart), a non-profit, non-partisan research organization that collects and distributes information on candidates for public office in the United States.

“It was this big 150-acre ranch in the middle of nowhere on the Continental Divide,” Gann said. “I love the outdoors, so I used the savings from all my odd jobs to do that internship, and then I got hired full time thereafter.”

After a couple of years with Vote Smart, Gann started proactively thinking about his next step. As he was exploring the job market, his father, who was a principal at the time, put Gann in touch with one of the parent chaperones he met on a field trip in Washington, D.C., who was from Chicago. 

“He said he could help me get my foot in the door for an internship in Chicago with ASGK Public Strategies, now Kivvit. Current owner and fellow Michigander, Eric Sedler, partnered with David Axelrod to found the firm and gave me my first chance at a career. I’ll always be very grateful to Eric for that opportunity to prove myself,” Gann said. 

Gann applied, but the process took some time. While he was waiting to hear back from Kivvit, he went back to Michigan and began working as a roofer.

“One day I was carrying a bunch of shingles up a roof, and I got this call where I was offered the internship on a three-month contract,” Gann said. “I ended up being there for five years, working on a lot of really interesting stuff with a lot of really smart, passionate people.” 

One of Gann’s highlights at Kivvit was working on a variety of projects for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Gann helped put together communications plans and assisted with media training for athletes.

“I also worked with the Navy SEAL Foundation to generate media coverage around their Chicago Evening of Tribute event, which featured retired four-star Army General and former CIA Director David Petraeus,” Gann said. 

His responsibilities on that project included drafting press releases, staffing interviews with former SEALs like Rear Admiral Garry Bonelli and Mike Day, and working with the media at the event itself.

Other highlights at Kivvit included promoting the 2016 Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series Chicago, staffing events for the Obama Foundation and having a small role on the campaign to bring the Obama Presidential Center to Chicago.

Though Gann enjoyed living and working in Chicago, he had grown up exploring the forests, lakes and rivers of Northern Michigan, and he longed to get back to those kinds of environs. So when he discovered a job posting for a Strategic Partnerships Manager for the Wyoming Office of Tourism, he jumped at the chance.

“It’s pretty hard to turn down a job when they’re gonna pay you to go to Yellowstone,” Gann said. “Plus, the job blended the public affairs experience I could bring with work in the government arena, and also allowed me to help oversee the state’s professional rodeo team, Team Wyoming, and support college rodeo programs and the sport as whole across the state.”

Some of the main things that attracted Gann to the role were the community building and economic development aspects, which provided him with yet another opportunity to be exposed to different perspectives and contexts.

“I really enjoy helping communities figure out strategic and economic development plans, because you get people who are passionate about their communities,” Gann said. “Leaning on my previous experience living in an 800-person town in Montana, I understood the dynamic there.”

However, just like the Great Recession when Gann graduated from K, the COVID-19 pandemic threw a very large wrench in the works. 

“Tourism is the second largest industry in Wyoming,” Gann said. “All of a sudden, borders are closed and you’re not getting that international visitation from Asia or Canada or Europe going to Yellowstone and injecting money into the country’s least-populated state.”

In response, Gann recruited more than 10 other government agencies like the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and other Wyoming agencies, to join his agency’s responsible recreation campaign called “WY Responsibly.” 

“We had to take a step back as an agency and retool our campaign on the fly,” Gann said. “We had to rethink how we were going to approach the pandemic, what we were going to focus on and, most importantly, how to do this safely.” 

While many people may think of tourism in Wyoming as a family driving through Yellowstone taking pictures, there’s a lot more to the Cowboy State. 

“Wyoming is a heavy exporter of extraction minerals,” Gann said. “So anytime the industry fluctuates—whether it’s coal, trona or uranium—all those hotel rooms for miners that companies pay for are gone. And by extension, there’s things like lost restaurant revenue, lodging revenue and other local tax revenues that hurt these communities.”

While Wyoming, like every other state in the nation, did experience some losses, the state as a whole fared much better than others. In 2020, Wyoming had record monthly visitation rates in its national parks, and a 300 percent increase in visitation at some state parks. Additionally, initial economic indicators from last year show that while the U.S. travel industry contracted by about 36 percent on average, Wyoming only contracted by 23 percent.

“We were able to keep money coming in and help sustain our communities,” Gann said. “We applied for CARES Act and then American Rescue Plan funding to serve as a funnel for these communities, applying on the behalf of the State then distributing it out to them.”

Next year is the 150th anniversary of Yellowstone, and Gann expects it to be a post-COVID boon to the state. 

“Our goal next year is to focus on economic development and destination development across the state, county by county, continuing to help communities with their strategic development plans, so we can keep building on this momentum,” Gann said.

As Gann looks forward to working toward a brighter future for the businesses and communities of Wyoming in a hopefully COVID-free world, he never forgets how he got here, or how many different perspectives and cultures he’s encountered along the way.

“I’ve worked and lived in some incredibly conservative and liberal areas,” Gann said. “I’ve been successful by remembering that everybody—whether a rancher in Wyoming or a family on the South Side of Chicago—has a story and is proud of where they come from, so being curious is the best way to understand how they got to their point of view.

“At K, learning to take a step back and be curious has served me well and taught me to meet people where they are, and that’s opened a lot of doors for me.”

While many climate crisis activists use images of devastation to waken the public to the imminent dangers of our changing climate, Fiorella Ikeue ’06 takes a different approach. Her tool of awakening is the beauty we may miss in our harried every day. 

Ikeue uses art to illustrate the beauty of our planet, enticing the viewer to take a closer look, a look that will, one hopes, turn into an appreciation worthy of the fight to save that beauty. The Peruvian-American illustrator has combined her love of art and science to create intricately detailed illustrations of nature, scientific ideas and environmental issues. 

“Art is about emotion,” Ikeue said. “Science is about information. Art and science can be similar in how they make you sit back and observe. They complement each other and can connect people to the natural world.”

Born in California to parents who emigrated from Peru, Ikeue moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, with her family at age 8. The family often traveled back to Peru, Ikeue’s first exposure to the world outside of the States. 

“Peru is an eye-opener,” she said. “People seem happy even though there is an astounding level of poverty— Peruvians know how to do with very little. And the coast, the Andes, the Amazon Rainforest are full of such natural wonder. I would love to return there again someday to do illustrations.”

Ikeue’s interest in both biology and art were sparked by her Peruvian roots. 

She enrolled at Kalamazoo College after visiting several Midwest colleges, drawn to the study abroad program and majoring in biology.

“Biology seemed like the better career path, perhaps more practical than art,” Ikeue said. 

It was Binney Girdler, professor of biology, who spotted her student’s gift for illustration on the margins of her class notes. 

“Professor Girdler saw some of my doodles on my notes and admired them,” Ikeue said. “She asked me if I’d ever thought about science illustration. That was the first I’d ever heard of it.”

The idea for a different career path, one that would combine her two interests, got tucked away in the back of Ikeue’s mind, noted but then nearly forgotten, as she traveled to France for nine months of study abroad. It was her chance to explore Europe, traveling to Spain, Germany, Italy, Greece. The experience developed a taste for adventure.

“I went to Japan for four years after I graduated from Kalamazoo College,” she said. “I was craving more adventure, even though I didn’t speak Japanese or know anything about the culture other than ‘Hello, Kitty.’ I liked the risk.”

Ikeue taught English in a government program for elementary to high school students. 

It was in Japan that she met Kosuke, the man she would marry. 

“He was a nurse in Japan, but liked to DJ at nightclubs,” she said. “That’s where we met. I didn’t speak Japanese, and he didn’t speak English, but we bonded over music. We watched music videos together.”

By 2012, Ikeue was fluent in Japanese, married, and moved back to the States—to San Francisco—with her new husband. She took a job at Patagonia, a clothing business known for its activism, with a mission to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis. 

“It was initially just as staff, just so I could get back to San Francisco, but I was at Patagonia for four years, and working there brought me back to science because of their mission,” Ikeue said. “Patagonia opened my eyes to activism.”

Ikeue was asked to create chalkboard art for the store—drawings of plants and animals in parts of the world where the store supported environmental groups—and a memory surfaced in Ikeue’s mind. 

Binney Girdler’s words… “Have you ever considered science illustration?”

“Patagonia offered paid internships, so I requested an internship at the Ojai Raptor Center,” Ikeue said. “I worked cleaning bird cages, but meanwhile I was doing illustrations for them and building up my portfolio.”

Ikeue drew detailed and colorful drawings of an American kestrel feeding a tiny lizard to its open-mouthed babies in their nest. She drew a barn owl, its wings outspread just before swooping down on an unsuspecting mouse. She drew a great horned owl, a red-tailed hawk, a detailed foot of a Cooper’s hawk, the silhouette of a peregrine falcon. 

A passion for science illustration was born, a new path unfurling ahead. 

In 2017, Ikeue earned a master’s certificate in science illustration from California State University Monterey Bay. She taught art classes for visitors at Yosemite National Park and created brand-focused illustrations for nonprofits. A new job at Ink Dwell Studio with artist Jane Kim had Ikeue scaling buildings and painting immense murals.

“I learned how to start on paper, get ideas down, then transfer them onto the wall using a grid,” Ikeue said. “You really have to get it all figured out before you start painting on a building.”

Drawing nature and living in California intensified Ikeue’s awareness of the changes in the environment. 

“I’ve seen those pink skies,” she said. “Pink from wildfires. We couldn’t go outside because the air was so bad. It’s scary. With my art, I want to wake people up to what is at stake around us—look at this! It’s important to connect to people emotionally. I’ve drawn animals covered in oil, for instance, but at some point, I realized that the best way to get attention is to focus on the amazing things on this planet. I like to zoom in on small things, get close up, so people can see things in a new way, in a way they haven’t seen them before. I like drawing insects for that reason.”

And then there was Rain. Rain, Ikeue’s son, was born in 2021, and he was the reason Ikeue and her husband moved back to Japan. 

“It’s too expensive to give birth to a child in the United States,” Ikeue shrugged. “So we returned to Japan, where we could get the maternal care I needed for much, much less.”

In September, a baby boy in her arms, the Ikeue family returned—this time full circle to Michigan, to spend time with her family. 

“I look at Rain now and wonder,” Ikeue said. “I wonder what his world will be like as he grows up. All I can do is instill a love of nature in him.” 

Since 2017, Hurricane Maria, earthquakes and the worst pandemic in a century have combined to continually devastate Puerto Rico, the native home of Adriana Garriga-López, an associate professor of anthropology at Kalamazoo College.

“These disasters are very personal for me,” Garriga-López said. “I worry about my family and friends. I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, went to high school in Puerto Rico, and I didn’t leave until I went to college, always with the intention of returning.”

Most of Garriga-López’s family lives on the islands and have experienced the disasters that hurt much of the U.S. territory’s infrastructures, causing blackouts that have lasted for months, if not years, while perpetuating an economic crisis and rampant unemployment.

Any of these individual disasters and their compounding factors could logically stress health care workers, stretching their tangible resources as well as their personal bandwidth as they tend to the sick and injured. Nearly a million people have left the islands in the past 10 years, including many health care providers, Garriga-López said. Yet many others have stayed on and shown great dedication and humanitarianism.

To study the effects of these disasters on health care workers, Garriga-López and Jessica Mulligan, a professor of health policy and management at Providence College in Rhode Island, have received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. Through their combined research—which includes bilingual students from underrepresented communities at both colleges—they’re exploring whether and how the ethics of health care provisioning change through multiple catastrophes, while recording how health care workers respond emotionally to major disasters, care for patients during emergencies, and work to rebuild and strengthen health care systems.

The three-year grant officially started March 1 and has included excursions to Puerto Rico for the entire team, although Garriga-López and Mulligan started their groundwork much sooner.

“This is a project that we began working on in 2018,” Garriga-López said. “Shortly after Hurricane Maria, we started documenting the experiences of health care providers, broadly speaking—interviewing not just doctors and nurses, but also community pharmacists, psychologists, hospital administrators—a wide variety of health care providers—to document the ways in which people stepped up during a period of intense crisis, and did extraordinary things. These are things that were mostly not documented in the mainstream media.”

Since then, their research has continued to show that many of these health care workers, despite additional earthquakes and COVID-19, haven’t necessarily been discouraged or completely burnt out. Instead, they’ve experienced “compromiso,” a feeling that translates to commitment, and yet goes beyond that definition to signify a heartfelt and enduring dedication to and compassion for their fellow Puerto Ricans and other island residents.

“Many of these health care workers went into communities and started providing services, often free of charge,” Garriga-López said. “It was incredible to hear those people tell us about rolling up their sleeves and doing anything they could for anyone who needed it after Hurricane Maria. We saw this kind of outpouring again with the earthquakes, although to a smaller scale because the effects were more localized to the southwest. And then, of course, in March 2020, we had the beginning of coronavirus. When we talk about compounding disasters, we also talk about it as a cascade of disasters because this pandemic is happening while people are still recovering from Hurricane Maria. Many people are still rebuilding their homes.”

The grant and their work carry local significance because, according to K’s Office of Institutional Research, they represent the first NSF Cultural Anthropology grant awarded to a faculty member at K. Plus, the project has global significance for what it stands to reveal regarding ethics in health care as the frequency and severity of natural disasters have increased around the world.

The research team is hoping to argue that rebuilding a health care system like Puerto Rico’s requires local involvement with individuals in affected areas offering the most relevant solutions to the most prominent problems. In the meantime, Garriga-López and K students Mauricio Guillén ’22 and Stacy Escobar ’21 have conducted interviews with health care workers in Puerto Rico, discovering a common theme among the stories told by those workers on the front lines of the region’s recovery.

‘They greet everybody with so much love’

Guillén and Escobar knew before they even left Michigan that they had been given an extraordinary gift. They had a chance to spend five weeks in Puerto Rico performing in-person, paid professional ethnographic work that detailed human stories of survival through crises. Then they arrived and began work on what Escobar called old-school anthropology, meaning they had to cold-call or approach strangers on the street or in their offices to ask for interviews.

“Many times, during the interviews I had to hold back my tears because of how real the stories were,” said Guillén, an anthropology-sociology and biology double major. “It’s completely different to do this research in the classroom or read about it. We were immersing ourselves in it, seeing and feeling the stories that people told us. I learned to be a deeper thinker about society and social justice issues from them.”

In traveling between cities, they saw locations that seemed like ghost towns because of earthquake damage. Some homes were marked with a yellow X to communicate danger, and others with a red X to show they were uninhabitable. There were also houses in complete rubble.

“There were people who had to go without food, clean water or electricity, and I don’t know how I would do it,” Escobar said. “Despite all these hardships, everyone in Puerto Rico always brought up community and the importance of helping each other. Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, but it has its own culture, its own environment. I feel they always talk about how those hardships brought them together. I think we in the continental U.S. are more individualistic and we’re focused on what we need to do for ourselves to survive. I feel so much of our own lives is about work. In Puerto Rico, there’s an emphasis on community.”

The sense of community Escobar described could be one aspect of compromiso, which was quickly confirmed in early interviews their group conducted. As a result, Guillén noted, the questions in subsequent interviews purposely avoided the term to see whether other health care workers used it in their responses.

“We asked people, ‘Why did you stay after all of these disasters?’” Guillén said. “And they repeatedly said, ‘I have this compromiso with my people. I have this compromiso with my island. I have this compromiso with my family. It’s my home and these are my roots.’ It was just beautiful to hear because if they wouldn’t have stayed, who would’ve?”

Escobar noted that after first discussing what they wanted to accomplish in a day, the team obtained interview opportunities on a regular basis through sending emails and conducting cold calls, as well as engaging in the method of snowball sampling, where interviewees would help recruit more interviews through acquaintances and professional contacts. In this way, they were able to expand their footprint beyond San Juan to other cities, where they could see how other communities were affected.

“In some cases, we would just walk up to EMTs who were sitting by parked ambulances,” Escobar said. “We would walk up to clinics and doctors’ offices to ask if there was anybody we could interview. Sometimes there was a yes and that was exciting. Sometimes there would be a no and we’d continue on to another place. Each hospital or EMT we approached had similar, yet distinct experiences.”

Regardless, in town after town, interviewees raised the theme of compromiso.

“So many health care workers who we interviewed have that sense of duty and love for their community,” Escobar said. “They greet everybody with so much love.” 

Moving from professional ethics to an ethics of care

Garriga-López and Mulligan met when both attended Harvard University’s Puerto Rico Winter Institute in San Juan in 2005. That year, part of the institute was focused on HIV and AIDS in Puerto Rico, which was the focus of Garriga-López’s doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, from where she graduated in 2010. Mulligan was a graduate student in anthropology at Harvard at the time. Now, she’s a medical anthropologist who has written a book titled Unmanageable Care that chronicles how the privatization of the health care system in Puerto Rico transformed the experience of accessing and providing care in the 1990s.

“We’ve always gotten along well,” Garriga-López said. “When it came time to collaborate on a big project like this, it made sense to do it with Jessica. We were already on the same page about important issues and we were both excited about the opportunity to work with students, especially students from communities that are underrepresented in academia in a sustained way and provide them with hands-on professional training. It was an amazing experience for the students in many ways: culturally, socially, personally and professionally.”

Based on their research, Garriga-López says a couple of ideas are fundamental to their experience. 

First, there needs to be parity in Medicaid and Medicare funding for Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories to ensure equal access to the health care they require, especially with the Affordable Care Act not extending to Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories. 

“There’s a lot of racism, discrimination and imperialist sentiment about Puerto Rico wanting everything to be done for them,” Garriga-López said. “But when you read the transcripts of these interviews, it’s flabbergasting to see the contrast between those kinds of attitudes about Puerto Ricans, and the reality of what people did to survive and help other people be healthy and thrive. People have the right to live healthy lives in the places where they’re from. People shouldn’t have to leave Puerto Rico to be able to access decent health care.” 

Second, the U.S. should address Puerto Rico’s colonial status and lack of democracy with urgency.

“Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States and requires decolonization. There is no real democracy in Puerto Rico. While federal laws apply, there is no presidential vote in Puerto Rico,” Garriga-López said. “There are also no senators or representatives in Congress. Until this fundamental lack of self-determination is addressed, we’re going to continue to see this kind of situation, whether it’s in health care or education, which is another area where Puerto Rico has a deep crisis that has been produced through federal legislation. Until Puerto Rico is no longer a colony, we are going to continue to see this kind of deep injustice.”

In the meantime, Garriga-López recognizes what the NSF grant and her research is doing for herself, her students and her career.

“It’s given me a boon in every way possible in terms of enlivening my research agenda and involving my students more directly in it,” she said. “It has shaped the way that I’ve been teaching my classes over the last few years in terms of being more research-focused and thinking more concretely about what skills students need, and how I can give them experience they could take to graduate school or their careers. And for me personally, it gives me a great feeling of accomplishment to be principal investigator of a nationally funded project.”

This boon is also felt by students like Escobar, a critical ethnic studies major and anthropology-sociology minor, who says, “I definitely want to continue to conduct research in the future. The research we did in Puerto Rico allowed me to further my interest in field research.” She adds, “This experience has me thinking about applying for a Fulbright award that supports research grants.”

The group’s work also has long-term global implications and purposes.

“We know from the experiences we’ve had in the last few years that we have a new reality,” Garriga-López said. “People in California are dealing with fire storms and a pandemic. Others are dealing with severe flooding, heat waves and a pandemic. We’re going to continue to have these situations where people are dealing with multiple crises. We want to understand how first responders like health care providers act when we move away from professional ethics as codified in law or a job contract, and the enactment of what we call an ethics of care, which is what we do to help people beyond institutional logics and how that develops over time. For example, we documented the experience of general practitioners who in the days after Maria took up residence in empty public schools and treated anybody who showed up. Helping those in need became the primary ethical framework over and above professional or institutional ethics to an ethics of care. We’ve interviewed over 100 people so far—health care providers of all stripes—and every single one has said that recovering from these disasters has been a community-led effort. People in Puerto Rico have rolled up their sleeves and done whatever was necessary to serve their communities. There’s something deeply beautiful about that.” 

In a 1974 issue of the Kalamazoo College Review, Tish Loveless—beloved coach, professor of physical education and director of women’s intercollegiate sports—wrote, “On all educational levels, from pre-school through college, girls must have the opportunity, instruction and incentive to acquire a hierarchy of skills with which to fully realize their abilities in sports.” She also noted that “Funds, heretofore very small or totally lacking, must be provided, which are equivalent to those expended for boys and men, if girls and women are to have equal opportunity in sports.”

Loveless, who passed away in November 2016, served as director of women’s athletics from 1953 until she retired in 1986. During her tenure, she established women’s varsity teams in tennis, field hockey, archery, swimming, basketball, volleyball, soccer and cross country, as well as a number of intramurals. She was also the most successful coach of women’s teams in the history of the Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association. Her teams won 28 league championships: 23 in tennis, four in archery and one in field hockey. Her 1986 women’s tennis squad finished third in the nation.

A year after her death, Loveless extended her legacy at K with a gift through her estate plan, which more than doubled the size of the Tish Loveless Women’s Athletic Endowment, a fund that began with a gift from one of her former students, Elaine Hutchcroft ’63. It supports the day-to-day operations of the College’s women’s athletics teams.

Loveless’ commitment to women’s athletics lives on through this endowment. Yet there is still more that can be done to protect and enhance the legacy of women’s athletics at K. Director of Athletics Becky Hall says, “We have nine women’s programs, and Tish’s fund is important because it helps support every one of them. Growing this fund would not only enrich the experience of our female student-athletes, it would help our women’s teams compete at the highest levels.”

Loveless also strongly believed in the value of a liberal arts education. In addition to her athletics gift, she used a portion of her estate to fund an endowed scholarship in the name of Marilyn Hinkle ’44, her lifelong friend, who was a member of K’s staff for more than 30 years. This scholarship supports women studying visual arts or music.

“Tish’s passion and leadership in establishing the women’s athletic program at K were gifts in and of themselves; through her estate, she has ensured subsequent generations of female athletes, artists and musicians can flourish at the College,” says President Jorge G. Gonzalez. 

Tish touched the lives of thousands of students during her tenure at K; in 1992, the College inducted Loveless into its Athletic Hall of Fame and, in 2015, dedicated the Tish Loveless Court at the Anderson Athletic Center to honor her legacy. “I would have loved to have met Tish,” Hall says. “I hear from so many K alumni and friends that she was absolutely one in a million!”

To give in memory of Loveless, please visit our online giving page. Under “Designation” scroll to “Other” and enter “Tish Loveless Women’s Athletics Endowment” or “Marilyn Hinkle ’44 Scholarship.” To learn how you can join the Stetson Society by including K in your estate plans, contact Matthew Brosco, Esq., senior associate director of planned giving, at mbrosco@kzoo.edu or 269-337-7288.