Kay Alexander ECW

Kay Alexander doesn’t believe in sitting on the sidelines   At St. Mark’s Upland, her parish, she serves on the vestry (her vestry chair is “worship”), heads the Altar Guild, is a LEM and, as an ardent gardener, serves on the flower guild.

So she was the logical recruit to be tapped for president of Episcopal Church Women (ECW), on the theory that busy people get more done.  She succeeded Martha Estes, whose three-year term had expired, leaving a big gap.  When no one stepped up to run for the office, acting president Donna Keller had started nudging Alexander to take the post.  “I kept saying I’d think about it,” recalled Alexander, “but after a while, it occurred to me that eventually I was going to give in, so I just opened my mouth and said ‘yes’.”

“I’ve gotten myself involved in so many things this past year,” said Alexander, whose husband, Michael Alexander, died in January of 2006.  “It may be overcompensating, but I like being busy.”

She has always been busy, but not always in the Episcopal Church.  Growing up in Wichita, Kansas, she was raised a Methodist. “But when we married and moved to California, I just didn’t go to church at all, for about 30 years.” But in the early 1990s, deciding she needed another dimension to her life she started church shopping, found an Episcopal Church and the fit was comfortable. “The first Sunday, I just sat back and watched.  But it felt right—it felt like this was where I was meant to be!”

 “I liked the liturgy and the idea of the centrality of the Eucharist,” she said.  “So many Protestant Churches only have communion occasionally.  The second or third week in the Episcopal Church I returned to the pew after the Eucharist and was kneeling and, I swear, there was a presence that just came over me and settled around me.”

She got involved with ECW several years later when Dolores Conyer, a fellow parishioner at St. Mark’s and ECW treasurer, asked her to serve as co-treasurer.  It seemed a logical choice, as Kay is a planner for Aptara Corp., which provides publishing services to major textbook publishers.  She works mainly on the sales forecast, providing financial analyses and doing labor projections.

Doing financial reports for ECW was a little more complicated than she had expected:  “I had never used QuickBooks, the software program, and had to learn that—it’s a little bit of work.”

Alexander was installed as ECW president at the 2007 March annual conference which provided a new look for the diocesan-wide organization.  It was slimmed down from a two-day event in a hotel to one full day at the Cathedral Center. “The cost was very accessible and the Cathedral Center provided child care,” said Alexander.  “The mothers were just thrilled.”  

And she likes the fact that the Episcopal Church has taken as a mission priority the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, aimed at eradicating global poverty.  “We’ve made those our ECW goals for this year,” she said.  “We are already doing many of them, such as the United Thank Offering.”

“Eradicating poverty and hunger, and reducing child mortality are issues women in the church have traditionally been interested in,” she said.  “And now we have a lot of clout behind it with the whole idea of the Beijing Circles.”

“The program called the Beijing Circles particularly addresses the Millennium Goals that affect the lives of women,” Habecker explained.  “The Circles give a program and format for gathering people together around a common concern in order to have a greater impact.  Literacy, health care, economic equity and violence against women are some of the topics.
  
‘I find that it helps to give people a specific way to address; these overwhelming problems,” she added.  “Collecting money is great, but there are other ways to respond to needs.”

Alexander agrees:  “Circles are an excellent way of working toward the goals and women’s ministries are a great resource.”

“Our times require female models such as Julian,” said Voorhees.  “Our times require us to examine the role of women and the marginalized more closely, because they are generally the ones Jesus still stops at the well and speaks to.”;

And she offered encouragement for newcomers to ECW:  “The Episcopal Church Women can be a perfect vehicle for you to make a difference.  ECW has many opportunities to powerfully change the world we live in, with such programs as the United Thank Offering, Women of Vision and especially promoters of gender equity.”

“I thought she put our message out there so well,” said Alexander.  “It was just perfect.”

                                                                                    --Connie Koenenn