Catherine Kennedy is a real life wonder woman. She’s involved in Boys and Girls Club of Central Ohio; Jones Middle School PTO for diversity, equity and inclusion; Equal UA, a task force to expand the community’s knowledge of local history; and more.
On top of that, she’s a proud mom of two.
It is not easy balancing everything that demands her attention, but her love of the fight for equality and justice is well worth the chaotic schedule.
“I don’t think I ever show up anywhere not as a board member of Equal UA or not as a board member of Boys and Girls Club,” Kennedy says. “They’re sort of always in my mind, and so it’s often that the work I’m doing does overlap.”
John Nixon John Nixon Photography
As a lifetime resident of Upper Arlington, bettering the community she grew up in is a major priority.
“My focus is centered around social justice,” she says. “I think the opportunity that Upper Arlington has is to become a more welcoming, inclusive community where we’re enriched by diversity while also making our resource-rich community accessible.”
Kennedy has been a board member of Boys and Girls Club for just over a year as the philanthropy chair and recalls her first engagement with the club fondly.
“I really got involved two years ago to help with their fundraising event,” she says, “and then I did some grant writing for them, and I just fell in love with their mission.”
The Boys and Girls Club provides after school programming and summer care programs that focus on mentorship for students in underserved areas where violence, unemployment and other factors that make childhood difficult are prevalent.
“It’s so much more than after school and summer care,” says Kennedy. “It’s about the relationships that kids have with the staff that speak to their social emotional wellness, but then the programming focuses on academic success, character and leadership, and healthy lifestyles.”
Boys and Girls Club of Central Ohio is still involved in outreach during quarantine with new health and safety practices in place.
The club serves more than 4,000 kids in central Ohio. It was able to adapt quickly to new social distancing protocols and had volunteers meet with the members online to continue those important relationships with their children.
“(The kids) are awesome, and they all deserve to reach their potential and have all the opportunity that they deserve,” Kennedy says. “That’s really what our mission is, to give them all the opportunity that they deserve.”
Through her chair position, Kennedy and the club raised enough money to build a brand-new building in the Milo-Grogan neighborhood in Columbus. The building will house two of the Boys and Girls Clubs in addition to the corporate headquarters.
Getting involved and giving back are great ways to feel connected to your community.
“We can each recognize our own privileges and challenge ourselves to help others,” Kennedy says. “It’s really important to be part of that cycle, understanding that everyone can help, and everyone needs help throughout their lives.”
Check out the Boys and Girls Club of Central Ohio and Equal UA here.
Kennedy is also passionate about students closer to home in Upper Arlington. As the head of the diversity, equity and inclusion committee for the Jones Middle School PTO, she’s been hard at work to start important conversations with other parents in the community.
The schools implemented training for their staff and realized that it was time to pull parents into the work as well. They asked that every school have a PTO diversity, equity and inclusion committee.
“I just happened to be the president-elect for our middle school at the time, and the president said, ‘How do you feel about getting this started?’” Kennedy says. “Given that this is something I care so much about, I said I would be super happy.”
Her involvement on the PTO led her to another involvement: Equal UA.
Catherine Kennedy and friend Seyla Kramer, PTO Diversity, Equity and Inclusion co-chairs for Jones Middle School.
“My friend Seyla Kramer and I engaged with (Equal UA) because we have been doing the diversity, equity and inclusion work in the school and it just felt like it made sense to connect and jump in,” she says. “It’s sort of the same idea around the parent group, but community wide, which is providing educational and community building opportunities around the topic of diversity, equity and inclusion.”
One of the recent initiatives of Equal UA involved collaborating with a task force headed by the chief academic officer for UA schools. Its mission: tell the story of Pleasant Litchford.
“He just has this really incredible legacy,” says Kennedy, “but for people in Upper Arlington, it was not a story that had been passed down.”
Pleasant Litchford was a prominent Black man who was incredibly active in the UA community in the 1800s, when it was just Perry Township. He founded a school for students of color and a cemetery for people of color – the same cemetery that UAHS is built on.
The task force asked Equal UA to work with other community organizations to pull all the dates and facts, and then check all the dates and sources, to create one common story about Pleasant Litchford to share with the community.
“The hope is to make this something that is part of the history told at every level,” says Kennedy. “It allows us to expand the curriculum and to explore the complexity of UA’s past, the complexity of history in general. It’s a part of a bigger narrative.”
Catherine Kennedy with others on the Pleasant Litchford task force.
Kennedy looks to Litchford, James Preston Poindexter, Washington Gladden and all the civil rights activists of the past as immense sources of inspiration.
“It’s these connections to people who came before,” she says. “I didn’t even realize the fight that those people had to go through even to get us where we are today. Whatever we’re doing to move the needle is only because of what they did before us.”
It’s clear that Kennedy and those who fight for the same mission have, indeed, moved the needle.
“I’m really proud at the progress I’ve seen us make over the last few years in terms of seeing people be brave about talking about the things that are hard to talk about, like privilege and diversity and equity and inclusion,” she says. “We obviously have a lot of work to do still, but we’re moving in the right direction.”
Who was Pleasant Litchford?
Take a step back into history to the land that would one day become Upper Arlington. It’s the 1830s, and Pleasant Litchford, a man who had been enslaved in Lynchburg, Virginia, has purchased his freedom as well as that of his wife and children, and made his way to Perry Township.
As a master blacksmith, Litchford quickly rose to prominence through the skill of his trade. Blacksmiths were vital to new and growing communities as they made everything from locks and doorknobs to nails and horseshoes. Litchford was well respected by families of all backgrounds.
He bought a few plots of land and began using his voice to advocate for the Black people in the area. Litchford helped to build a school for Black children as well as a cemetery so people of color had an honorable place to bury their family members.
His legacy extends beyond land, although he had been among the community members who owned the largest amount of land in Perry Township. Litchford was one of the founders of Second Baptist Church, the first African American Baptist church in central Ohio, which still operates today.
Through the church, Litchford connected with Rev. James Preston Poindexter, a prominent abolitionist and civil rights activist. He acted as a mentor to Poindexter, who would become the first African American on both the Columbus City Council and the Columbus Board of Education at the turn of the century.
In the late 1940s, long after Litchford’s passing, part of Perry Township was annexed into the City of Upper Arlington. The land that included his cemetery was slated for the location of the new high school. When the city was preparing the land for the high school, it discovered the abandoned cemetery, which traced back to Litchford.
In 1955, UA Board of Education committed $5,000 to move 10 bodies from the cemetery and ended up moving 27 over the course of three days. Most went to Union Cemetery and were placed in an unmarked plot, while a few others went to Greenlawn Cemetery. The new high school opened in 1956.
In 2017, Kim Shoemaker Starr and Diane Kelly Runyon published the book Secrets Under the Parking Lot, which they wrote after Shoemaker Starr rediscovered the story of the Litchford cemetery beneath the high school parking lot. Through their extensive research, the authors pieced together what we know today about Litchford and his family.
With the support of the current UA Board of Education and Superintendent Paul Imhoff, they have joined with historians, archaeologists, community members and the Litchford descendent community to recognize the story as part of the rich history of Upper Arlington, and Litchford’s legacy of perseverance and inclusion is a model that can be celebrated for years to come.
Sarah Robinson is a contributing editor. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
