Insidethisissue - aha Creative Ink

alumni and faculty, and annually
organize a fairly major river
trip of almost all Prescott
College friends.
Jeff Kiely
Gallup, N.M.
’73, Education, Organizational
Behavior and Religious Studies
I landed at Prescott College in
fall 1971 after one-year stints at
NAU and New College in
Sarasota, Fla. In spring 1971, a
fellow student told me he was an
exchange student from a “sister
school” in Arizona— Prescott
College—and he urged me to
give it a try. I landed at Prescott
College that fall and was immediately
attracted by the rural
campus setting and collective
personality of this “learning
community.” After a 26-day
adventure orientation in the
wilderness of southern Utah and
northern Arizona, I was hooked!
By fall 1972, I was fully integrated
into the life and spirit of
Prescott College. I edited the
campus newspaper and became
student body president. With
the partnership of fellow students
and faculty, I helped start
an environmental clearinghouse,
a “school-within-a-school” community
learning center that hosted
high-interest, noncredit seminars
by students and faculty, a
community garden, a natural
foods section in the cafeteria,
and an on-stage “campus conversation”
interview program.
Since graduation, I earned a
master’s degree in education
from ASU and did post-graduate
work at National University. I’ve
worked in a variety of settings,
from a boarding school in
Tanzania to the Native American
Bahá’í Institute on the Navajo
Reservation. For the past 14
years, I’ve worked as senior
planner and deputy director of
the Northwest New Mexico
Council of Governments, headquartered
in Gallup, where my
work started with a regional substance
abuse prevention initiative
and grew to include a wide
range of organizational, environmental,
social and economic
development projects, and planning
ventures.
My wife Helen has served for
many years as a teacher in
schools on the Navajo
Reservation and in Gallup, currently
teaching Navajo Language
and Culture at a junior high
school. My son Sean is a rock
musician and artist still living in
Gallup, and my daughter
Philana is entering her senior
year in business administration
at Fort Lewis College in
Durango.
My passions and avocations
include swimming and indeed
all manner of indoor and outdoor
sports, poetry, writing,
folk music, languages, the arts,
alternative energy and technologies,
intercultural studies,
and the nurturing of spiritual
community.
Since my “coming home”
experience at Prescott College
in late October 2003, I have
been re-inspired by the vision,
holism, audacious curiosity,
innovation, and compassion that
lie at the heart of the Prescott
College experience and that forever
bind together the hearts
and minds of its alumni. It is primarily
on the basis of that inspiration,
the memories and sense
of hope and connectedness it
evoked, and my reunion with
Prescott people (including some
on the Board) who mean so
much to me still, that I have
expressed my interest in serving
on the Alumni Board.
Lee Stuart
Bronx, N.Y.
’75, Environmental Studies
I spent the first 10 years after
graduation preparing for and
starting an academic career as
an ecologist. I received my master’s
degree from San Diego
State and Ph.D. from a joint
program between San Diego
and UC Davis. My primary area
of study was systems ecology
and soil/plant relationships, par-
ticularly in the Alaskan arctic.
During my dissertation and particularly
as a post-doctoral
research associate, I helped create
what became an international
food aid and community
development program (SHARE
– Self-Help and Resource
Exchange). The success of this
program led me in 1985 to the
South Bronx, where I have spent
the last happy 20 years helping
transform it so that it is no
longer the national spectacle of
urban poverty and mayhem.
After establishing SHARE in the
South Bronx, I helped raise
about a million dollars for arts
education for St. Augustine ’s
School (also in the South Bronx)
and then went to work for South
Bronx Churches. At SBC we
caused major problems and then
breakthroughs for a whole host
of city agencies by creating our
own bank to finance the first
and largest homeownership
development in the South Bronx
(974 homes), by organizing parents
to demand excellence in
secondary education for their
children, and forcing the Board
of Education to start a new high
school (since replicated) with a
90 percent college acceptance
rate. Now I am helping other
communities in fulfilling their
dreams for housing, education,
or whatever. In short, my whole
career has been about the grassroots—first
in a very literal sense
in terms of the soil-root interface,
and then in the creation of
powerful organizations at a very
local level to deliver a local
agenda.
Why would I serve on the
Board of PCAA and what I think
I could bring to it? I was invited
to consider serving by people I
respect a great deal (Layne
Longfellow and Matuschka).
I think PC is a wonderful institution
and would like to contribute
to its mission. I have tremendous
organizational skills and
lots of experience in strengthening
the relationship between
people and institutions.
Fall 2004Transitions
Jeff Kiely
Lee Stuart
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