After being among the first to graduate from KU's Ph.D. program, the alum is making a global impact.

By Susan Loyacano

Sherri Kirkpatrick has dedicated her life and career to empowering women and children in developing countries. She and her husband, Jac, co-founded HealthEd Connect in 2009, a nonprofit in Kansas City that trains volunteer community health workers in villages primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to providing assistance for the growing number of orphaned children due to HIV/AIDS, they mentor and develop local leaders to ensure the program is sustainable.

The origin of her interest in health care began in the 1970s when Kirkpatrick served as a foster parent for Mexican children having surgery at Stanford University Hospital. Moved by the resiliency of people from other cultures, Kirkpatrick set her sights on building a career of service to some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.

She earned her associate degree from Graceland University in Independence, Missouri, then moved across the country to get her Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree at California State University. Her husband’s job as a NASA aerospace engineer brought them back to Kansas City, where she earned her master’s in community health nursing at KU School of Nursing.

In 1982, the University of Kansas School of Nursing established a Ph.D. program, and Kirkpatrick was one of its first graduates. Her focus was on international nursing.

“I can’t say enough about what that doctoral program did for me,” she said. “It was the best educational experience I had anywhere in my life. Every course was aimed at where I was going, and everything I did was something I could use.”

Kirkpatrick said learning from and working with experts in their fields opened doors for her, most notably, Ann Cobb, RN, Ph.D. a professor of nursing.

 “Ann shared my passion for community health issues and helped open doors for me.”

Kirkpatrick devoted the next part of her life to education, spending nearly three decades at Graceland University as professor, provost, vice president of institutional advancement and dean of nursing for 20 of those years. Her husband had retired from NASA and was working full time with the Community of Christ Church establishing children’s camps and women’s retreats throughout Africa.

“We wanted to do something meaningful with our lives,” she said. “And we have never regretted it.”

While Jac spent weeks at a time working on the ground in Africa, the couple had very little communication.

“It was before cell phones,” Kirkpatrick said. “Eventually, I began joining him
on trips.”

Their efforts expanded first in Haiti and the Dominican Republic to places like Jamaica, Kenya, India, Nepal and beyond. She has trained at least 40 health workers — some of whom have volunteered for more than 20 years — who monitor more than 25,000 babies and pregnant women every year in areas where health care is scarce.

As Vice President of HealthEd Connect for the last 15 years, Kirkpatrick had the support of Graceland University former president John Sellars. They organized and enlarged programs she previously established at the school’s International Health Center and now operates under its own 501(c)3.

There are about 160 trained volunteers in four countries: Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Malawi and Nepal.

“I would have called them community health workers, but in each country, they chose a name for themselves,” she said. “For example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo they call themselves the Wasaidizi, which means a helper or an assistant. They haul their own water, make their own clothes and dress alike, they barter and trade, tend gardens, living simple lives like everyone else in their rural communities.”

HealthEd Connect collects donations to provide antibiotic ointment, bandages, books for the school and other items the volunteers can’t find locally. And every year they provide new fabric to each volunteer to make a new wrap skirt as part of their uniform. They also provide school lunches for the children.

“A traditional chief met with us under a tree during one of our trips and agreed to give us land in exchange for building a community center that they so desperately needed,” Kirkpatrick said. “That’s where they weigh the babies and do their work.

Kirkpatrick added that when the chief gave them nine acres for the community, center, other chiefs heard about it and many of them donated land as well.

“When we started working in Nepal, in some of the areas way up in the mountains, there was no sanitation,” she said. “One of the health workers knew that it was the cause of some diseases, so he was on a mission to build latrines. He taught people how to dig in the rocky soil and build very sturdy pits and very nice bath houses with ventilation and porcelain pans for Asian toilets they could keep clean. He has built 45 of them now.”

Kirkpatrick is particularly proud of the scholarship programs they have established for nurses, providing up to $1,500 a year, for a three-year program. Last summer they set out to train the trainers to do what Kirkpatrick has been doing all these years.

“Some of them are from the community schools that go up through seventh grade. They receive scholarships to attend high school and then to become nurses. One of the nurses who graduated is the daughter of one of my original health workers in Zambia.”

Kirkpatrick says her philosophy is that you treat development kind of like you do when you are tossing a ball to a 4-year-old child: you want them to catch it, so you stand close to them and don’t throw it very hard. And then you move back and throw it a little bit farther.

“Eventually it becomes their vision, their leadership. We simply supply the tools.”