When Kay Olson was fresh out of high school, she was faced with a choice between working to pay her bills or continuing school. Although she chose her job, she never lost her desire to continue her education. Decades later, she decided to go back to school and become a nurse.

Currently working at Washington State University Spokane School of Nursing, Olson played a key role in helping the Spokane Community Health District conduct a COVID-19 vaccination clinic. For her achievements, she received her 2023 YWCA Women of Achievement Science, Technology and Environment Award. Olson and the other winners will be honored at a luncheon on March 9, she will be held at the Davenport Grand Hotel.

Olson grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona, but his family moved in the middle of his senior year, and he graduated from Monument Valley High School on the Navajo Nation Reservation. He then moved to Phoenix with the goal of attending college and becoming a nutritionist. She got a job as a clerk at her JC Her Penny, but after completing her second semester of college, her boss said her school was interfering with her work. .

“I lost school because I had to pay rent and eat,” she said. .”

She continued to work, eventually got married and had children, but never lost sight of her goal of finishing school. “I didn’t go back to school until she was 42,” she said. “When her youngest son went to school, I knew it was my turn.”

She was no longer interested in becoming a nutritionist. She considered becoming a teacher, but at the time she was living in Idaho, where starting salaries for teachers are low. She met some nurses and talked about their jobs. After moving to her Tri-Cities, she joined her fourth cohort and took nursing classes at her new WSU her Tri-Cities campus.

“I knew through the program that I didn’t like working in a hospital,” she said. “My heart was with the community.”

After graduating in 2007, Olson immediately began a master’s program in community health at WSU. She volunteered at a free clinic and worked as her teaching assistant at WSU Tri-Cities. She was hired full-time after completing her master’s degree. She has been teaching community health among other subjects since her spring of 2009. Olson worked every summer as an occupational health nurse, including at the Hanford Nuclear Preserve clinic for over a decade.

She moved to WSU Spokane in 2019 and is the clinical leader of the public and community health course. She creates opportunities for nursing students to work in the community and learn how poverty, homelessness and lack of education affect health.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Olson worked with the Spokane Regional Health District to develop community health clinic rotations for nursing students, recruiting and training immunizers for many of the clinics that emerged. supported.

Olson said she enjoys exposing her students to community health. “I think it’s just culture and environment,” she said. “You are working more with vulnerable groups.

Olson said she has worked as a nurse and a teacher and has the best of both worlds. She’s 62, but she doesn’t plan on quitting anytime soon. “I love working and it gives me energy,” she said. “I love what I do. I love being part of the community.”

She is happy that her dream of going back to school has come true and that her children have watched her do so. I have a master’s degree.

“I always thought this was something I had to do for myself and my children,” she said. “Going back to school was the best thing I ever did for myself.”

Ann Mason, associate dean of academic affairs at the WSU College of Nursing, has worked with Olson since 2010 and says he has the ability to combine the best of nursing with community action. “She’s very thoughtful and really has a way of promoting an entity and an individual,” she said.

Olson’s research was key to access to a COVID-19 vaccine in Spokane County, Mason said. “She really deserves it,” Mason said. “She has been one of her extraordinary champions during the COVID pandemic.”

However, Olson said that while she was happy to have her work recognized, she was unsure whether she deserved the limelight. I said yes.

“I never did this myself,” she said. “I don’t want to be the center of attention.”