A life of helping people: Meet Kathleen Badejo
As a young girl growing up in San Diego, Kathleen Badejo knew that she wanted to help people when she grew up. “When I was five, I told my parents that I wanted to be a doctor. I was pretty sure that’s what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to help others.”
When she enrolled at Point Loma Nazarene University in California, she majored in exercise science. “My study there was a stepping stone to determining how I wanted to spend my time personally, and professionally.”
And what she kept coming back to was a life lived in pursuit of helping others. And, so, after graduation Bolamba applied for and was accepted into AmeriCorps’ City Year Program, which places service-minded individuals in schools across the country to work with students while also allowing them to acquire valuable skills that prepare them to be leaders in their communities.
Off to Chicago she went, where Badejo experienced her first Midwestern winter, and also got “a front row experience to disparity and inequities that are present in our educational systems—and in systems at large.”
“My personal experience,” she added, “ was in a predominantly white suburb of San Diego. Chicago was a culture shock from me—it was very different from my upbringing and it arose in me real questions about identity, and a passion about education.”
After two years engaged in the City Year program, she accepted a job at Embarc, where she worked directly with students to open up the city—and the possibilities it presented. “Awesome is an understatement,” she said about her time at the organization. “In my role, I curated learning experiences by building partnerships all across the city for young people. I got to widen opportunities for them, and the business and nonprofit professionals they interacted with.”
There has been a through-line throughout her work that she is excited to bring as the new grantmaking specialist at the Quad Cities Community Foundation. “I’m still that five-year-old girl interested in helping people, and I’m also interested in doing so in ways that create real equity in communities.”
Love brought Badejo to the Quad Cities—she is engaged to be married. And despite moving to the region during the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been quick to establish relationships and friendships that she hopes will build on the Community Foundation’s commitment to equity. “I look at everything through an equity and diversity lens because of who I am. I believe the work we do presents an opportunity to drive real systemic change. I’m looking forward to not upholding the status quo, but rather, to instigating positive change for the good of every person I work with.”