Kathy started her career in corporate America after earning her MBA Degree with a focus in Marketing with Oscar Mayer, Inc. She was 1 of 8 individuals accepted into their pre-management trainee program. She went on to be employed by Kraft Foods in Marketing Finance, and Ralston Purina in Marketing.
After five years at Ralston Purina as a Brand Manager, she decided to dedicate her time to raising her two children. Kathy has always had a passion for Christ and the community so during this time she started My Child’s Heart Ministry. As her children began to age, she thought about how best to teach them and other children ages 5-9 about salvation so she wrote and published “Let’s Talk about Salvation”, “Jesus Our Savior and Friend”, and created a Sunday school curriculum that families and churches around the country have used.
As parents asked her how she was able to raise children that respected authority and loved God, she decided to share her secrets by facilitating parenting classes around St. Louis, MO, and by conducting “Building Godly Family” conferences that are run by 100% volunteers. Kathy’s ability to see a need and tackle it has been the trademark mark of her life. She is not afraid of a challenge, and this is evident when you look at her life.
She realized that the Christian community needed guidance in money management, especially African Americans so she formed Houston Kirk Financial Consultants, wrote “Faith the First Step to Financial Freedom”, and used this book to conduct couples and group money management classes. She helped many families develop budgets and take control over their finances.
Once her children entered high school, a friend asked if she would be interested in working part-time as a marketing manager for a church and preschool and later Executive Director of a non-profit youth program. She accepted, she thought this would allow her to fulfill two of her passions – ministry and children. Little did she know this would open her up to a whole new world. Kathy utilized her marketing acumen to elevate the school and staff. She conducted semi-annual professional development for the teachers which consisted of team building, personal development like money management and goal setting, as well as educational development. Kathy wanted low-income families to have access to the same quality of education that middle to high-come families had. So, this led her to create a preschool curriculum for ages 2-year-olds to 5-year-olds. The success of the curriculum is evident by the tremendous enrollment growth and the fact that the majority of the students were reading when they graduated from Pre-kindergarten. From this point on, advertising was strictly Word of Mouth. She later launched an infant center for children ages 6 weeks to 2-years-old. She managed demolition and design of the building, the hiring and training of teachers, and development of the curriculum. Kathy’s work along with dedicated teachers and directors, catapulted the preschool into becoming a premier school in the North County area.
As the Executive Director of youth program, Kathy was instrumental in increasing enrollment by 200%, raising funds to subsidize the cost of the program, creating curricula for all of the specialty classes (The classes consisted of life skills, communication, coding, karate, cooking, science, engineering, money management, poetry, and art.), developing a Leadership in Training Program to give high school students on-the-job training and college mentoring and increasing literacy scores among students.
As Kathy noticed the mental state of our children, she began to partner with local mental health organizations to offer free individual counseling sessions and group sessions during summer camp hours.
She also discovered the low reading and math proficiency in her campers. She immediately added a Math and English class to the camp roster. Each camper was required to take these classes. She personally created a profile for each student based on their assessment on IXL.org to help move them further along. She was instrumental in advancing each class during the summer using the IXL.org program.
Kathy realized that an 8-week summer academic enrichment program was not enough based on the statistics of proficiency among African Americans in St. Louis so after she retired in May of 2023, she decided to create Literacy and Hope.
Kathy’s passion is creating programs that meet the need of the African American community.
Kathy’s hope is that you would join her in removing the educational barrier that is plaguing our community. Only 13% of St. Louis City public school students are proficient in reading. Basic reading skills should be free for all children. No parent should have to pay for tutoring. Kathy is excited about launching Literacy and Hope’s free tutoring program.