Nepal work feels like calling to ’04 grad
Kate Browne ’04 has been an intern at Team Rubicon, a first-response disaster relief non-profit, for the past six months, doing important work to help victims of a recent devastating earthquake in Nepal.
“Following the 7.8 earthquake in Nepal last week, Kate has been an instrumental cog in our response,” said Mike Lee, communications and fundraising coordinator for Team Rubicon. “With the field operations team, Kate helped vet, gather, and deploy over 50 medics, doctors, logisticians, and UAV pilots to Kathmandu.”
And now, Lee says, Browne very recently “was actually deployed alongside a medical team to Nepal – now she’ll be in-country assisting with our logistics.”
Browne, who was an English major at Saint Michael’s, recently shared with the Department’s newsletter that she “worked for JetBlue Airways in Airport Operations at both Burlington Airport and JFK until she moved to the North Shore of Oahu in Hawaii last year and got involved with Team Rubicon, a non-profit that unites veterans and first responders to provide disaster relief. In this work, Kate says, she has found her calling. She will begin a master’s in International Disaster Management at the University of Manchester in Manchester, England in September of 2015. This year she is traveling and volunteering and working in disaster relief.”
Her adviser from her student days, Will Marquess, instructor of English, says he remembers Browne well. “She’s a lovely person. I love reading that she feels she has found a calling. As a student, she was lively and bright, not always completely well organized (I bet she would confess this as well), but always full of good spirit.”
Marquess recalled a moment when she was taking Fiction Writing with him. “I had written a draft that we were going to discuss that day, including a reference to The Wizard of Oz,” he remembers. “When I looked out the window of Jeanmarie 378 for a couple of (slightly) late arrivals to class, there was Kate with a classmate, making their way across the courtyard with that special Yellow Brick Road skip. I was never more flattered about something I had written. Clearly, she has a heart, a brain, and courage. More power to her.”
Here’s a link to a blog about her relief work with Team Rubicon that Browne wrote before the Nepal earthquake that explains some of her motivations for doing service:
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