2005 Corpsmember of the Year: Kayje Booker
***Update! Click here to find out what Kayje’s been up to since accepting her award.***
Joining the Washington Service Corps’ AmeriCorps program changed Kayje Booker’s life. In the year before, she was working a variety of jobs, mostly in the food industry, and feeling generally dissatisfied and directionless in her work life. In her first year of AmeriCorps, Kayje had the task of co-creating an after-school program for academically challenged kindergarten through sixth graders, in which she facilitated a civic engagement course. The following year she implemented a civic engagement curriculum with 500 AmeriCorps members across the state of Washington and assisted Abt Associates with their evaluation of Washington Service Corps. Underway this year is a complicated project she is developing which includes the creation of a ‘Homes for Service’ initiative in Washington.
— “Serving others is now and will forever be a non-negotiable part of my life. However I spend my days, I must be able to come home at the end and know that my hours accomplished something that made the world a little better for someone else.”
(written in 2005)