Kim Priore

A little bit about me:  I was born in Natick, MA (the Home of Champions) and have lived pretty much my entire life in Massachusetts, alternately known as the Godless North, God’s Country, Home of the 2004 World Champion Boston Red Sox, or the Bay State.  I attended Wellesley College, where I majored in Religion and focused in particular on the history of religious movements in the United States.  While at Wellesley, I also devoted considerable amounts of time to writing for the school newspaper, interning off campus at the local ABC affiliate, and making copious trips to IHOP with the infamous group of friends known as the Newsies.  All of this was intended to help me achieve my goal of becoming the next Diane Sawyer or Cokie Roberts, and anchoring a network news broadcast.

But somewhere along the way this pesky voice inside my head kicked in, telling me that maybe, just maybe, there was more out there for me to do.  A year out of college I decided to shelve the journalism career and embark on a journey that continues to this day, a journey of discovering just how I might use the gifts, talent, and education bestowed on me to make this world a better place.  As it turns out, this may have been a catastrophic mistake, but the jury’s still out.

So where has this journey taken me?  To the nation’s capital, where I got to be communications director for one my favorite organizations in the world, Sojourners.  It’s also taken me through banking, babysitting, barista-ing (that is, pouring coffee for Starbucks, another of my favorite places).  I got a glimpse of marketing and brand identity when I worked in speaker placement for Carat.  The journey has also taken me, not once but twice, to Haiti – one of the most wonderful and terrible places you could ever want to be.  I haven’t stopped talking about it since.  And when finally I could resist the pull of geekdom no longer, I went back to school.

The past two years have been spent at Harvard, studying how religion (my first academic love) relates to international development (my burgeoning vocational passion).   We’ll see if all this homework and paper-writing leads to anything besides enormous debt and a fancy diploma in Latin.  In the meantime, life goes on.  The Red Sox continue to alternately thrill me and break my heart, my godsons are so adorable that it makes life worth living, my family’s a bit crazy but provides me with some good stories, and to quote the Big Lebowski, “the dude abides.”