Kathy Kirk, one of our wonderful clients, shares her journey from studying mathematics post children to a 40-year career in IT (starting in the early 80s), eventually transitioning to volunteer work with the American Foundation for Children with AIDS and setting up its Australian counterpart in early 2024. It’s a true Retiring with a Purpose story.
Career Kickstart
Kathy started her career later in life, choosing to do a mathematics degree after having children. About two-thirds of the way through the degree, she was asking herself ‘what am I going to do with this?’ – as teaching, actuarial work, or research (the common career paths then) didn’t interest her.
Then somebody said ‘ohh if you can do maths, you can do computing. Why don’t you do that?’ – which she says, ‘isn’t exactly true’. But nevertheless, this led to her unconventional start of a successful 40-year career in IT.
“People think how wonderful it is that I got into computing so early in the game.
What they don’t realize is in fact, I bumbled into it via that story.” Kathy says, and “Being the lone female, thank goodness, never really worried me that much. I suppose I got used to it very early on.”
Kathy joined Oracle about 10 years into her career, which saw her travelling the world, moving to the US for a while before coming back to Australia and spending time working in Asia.
Whilst still working, in 2008, the next serendipitous moment of her life came when she… “was again literally reading the paper on a Sunday, flipping through and saw an article about this volunteer trip to Mongolia and for reasons I can’t really explain, I’ve always been fascinated by Mongolia.”
The volunteer trip was with Habitat for Humanity and ignited her passion for humanitarian work. After this first trip, Kathy continued to volunteer yearly on trips to Guatemala, Nepal, Zambia, and Africa, and along the way was introduced to Tanya Weaver from the American Foundation for Children with AIDS.
This led to Kathy joining the American Foundation for Children with AIDS ‘Volunteer with Purpose’ trips to Africa, which she says were “transformative, providing her with a sense of purpose and fulfillment”.
Retiring with a Purpose
“And then as I turned 65, I was getting closer to thinking ‘ohh I certainly wanna retire before they ask me to retire’. So, I was sort of trying to work out what on earth I was going to do, and I have always been a fairly driven individual, had to stay busy, can’t sit around and watch TV type of person. So, after lots and lots of conversations with Tanya, we agreed that I would set up the Australian Foundation for Children with AIDS as I rolled towards retirement.
So I think we started to do all the government registrations and things about February of last year, 2023.” And “I actually retired on 31st May 2023”.
After a few hurdles, and leveraging on the partnership with the American Foundation, the Australian Foundation for Children with AIDs has been active since early 2024.
The Australian Foundation’s primary focus is fundraising, through various initiatives like craft pop-up stalls and community events, but Kathy will continue to go to Africa once a year on “a combination of the vacation with a purpose trip and auditing some of the projects that we do to make sure that you know the reports that they have to send to us are accurate”.
Vacation with a Purpose
The ‘Vacation with a Purpose’ trips are held “once a year in the June July time period, we go either to Zimbabwe or Kenya, so we don’t take people to dangerous areas.
It’s a two-week trip, of which there are two days at the end where we do touristy things.
So, for example in Zimbabwe we take people to Victoria Falls and they see the sunrise over Victoria Falls and then we have a day trip to Turbay National Park where we do a boat safari and in the afternoon a truck safari.
The other 10 days or so, as I say, is living and helping in the community and it could be anything from…we put up some strong barbed wire between fences, bottle honey, filled compost bags, built computers for the orphanage.”
Kathy also said: “I’ve been going on these trips now for many years and never once have I come back feeling as though I have left more in the community than they have given me.
I always come back feeling a little almost embarrassed because I feel as though I’ve got so much out of this trip.”
The goal is for the communities the foundation supports to become self-sufficient, and Kathy believes that one in particular will be fully self-sufficient within the next two years. They would have been closer to that now, but an unfortunate event last year set them back a little.
“I think it’s important to remember that even though these are often very intelligent people, they’ve had very little schooling. And they have little concept often of forward planning, because they’ve never had the opportunity to do so.
They make $5 on a deal…maybe selling something that they’ve grown, and to them that’s $5 they can use to buy things, that $5 that’s their profit. So, it’s taken us quite a few years to get the various partners to recognise, ‘well, hang on. Yes, you can spend some of that, but you really have to put it away for bad times as well.’
And we just had a classic example of that in Kenya. They had a really, really bad tropical storm come through. We had just replanted all the vegetable gardens and we had just replanted 6 hectares of rice. The storm came through and washed away the lot, both the gardens and the rice paddy.
Rice is one of our biggest money makers, but the fact that Frank, who’s our contact in Kenya, already had money aside…he was able to do some recovery and replant the gardens and replant the rice.”
This story shows the importance of the foundation’s work in providing resilience to communities facing natural disasters, and helping locals understand the importance of money management and saving for unforeseen circumstances.
Team Effort
Thanks to the efforts of the team and those that support the foundation through buying crafts or donations, on Kathy’s latest trip to Zimbabwe in July 2024, she was able to provide the money to build 2 long drop toilets for ladies in the community. “One of whom is just was literally jumping out of her skin when she was told” – as you can imagine, it can be quite dangerous for ladies who’s only option when needing the toilet is to go in long grass or behind a tree.
“It’s been amazing, and you know, to be able to retire and have something like this to move into has been brilliant.”
Kathy has 4 close friends/family members that support her with the foundation and ‘keep her in line’, and some incredible volunteers at local aged care facilities, all who knit and create some beautiful pieces to be sold at craft stalls she manages at local shopping centres across the weekend. The foundation also shares a board member of the American Foundation to ensure consistency.
The goal for the Australian Foundation for Children with AIDS is to become a recognised name amongst the community, which will help support local fundraising initiatives and in securing business partnerships to support ongoing projects in Africa.
Another is to expand community engagement, encouraging more people to become members, volunteer at events, or participate in trips to Africa. Kathy believes that firsthand experiences can be transformative and hopes to inspire more individuals to join, either via volunteering, crafting, donating directly or joining their annual trips.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can get involved and the impact Australian Foundation for Children with Aids is having, head to their website: https://afcaids.org.au
