Meet Kari Miller
By Janet Worne Mansfield
Kari Miller has chosen a busy and adventurous path through life and that’s the way she likes it.
“I played women’s tackle football for three years, roller derby for five years, and I coach middle school football”, she says. “I have also been skydiving and surfing. And I often think about starting an animal rescue.”
And that’s not even counting her many Sierra Club activities.
Kari joined the Sierra Club in 2014 soon after she returned to Owensboro from the New York and New Jersey area where she had attended graduate school. She wanted to get involved with a local organization and do her part to help protect the environment. “I couldn’t believe that environmental activism, even common practices like recycling, were still very limited in my hometown.” So she jumped in feet first.
Almost immediately she landed on the Pennyrile Group ExCom and has chaired the group for the past two years. She is also a member of the Chapter ExCom. She participated in the Connect the Dots training in San Francisco (2016) and the Ready for 100 Conference in Miami (2017). She helped start the Kentucky Ready for 100 group and has served on the Annual Gathering Committee, which she is now chairing.
And somewhere in the midst of all that, Kari holds down a job as an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Kentucky Wesleyan College as well as working on her dissertation towards a Ph.D. Her area of study during graduate school was Criminal Justice and Forensic Psychology. While in school she also did research on environmental activism and eco terrorism and the connections between the two.
Kari’s wife, Sam, is a high school special education teacher and head girls track coach. “We met playing football for the Jersey Justice while I was in graduate school”, she says. They have two dogs: “Ruby, a 100-pound sweet and stubborn beast, and her boss, Polly, a 20-pound feisty beagle that followed us home in a rainstorm.” They also have a cat named Rocky, who they adopted eleven years ago in New Jersey.
In spite of 40 years of a life filled with enough activities, accomplishments, and passion for three lifetimes, Kari is not done yet. She now wants to focus on getting younger members engaged, but she knows her goal requires a lot of listening and reaching out. It may also require some reframing of the way we do activities.
Click here to read the rest of the June edition of The Cumberland!