Mailloux selected as scholar for Aspen Ideas Festival

Mailloux selected as scholar for Aspen Ideas Festival

Kari Mailloux, Hutchinson Community Foundation program officer, will attend the Aspen (Colorado) Ideas Festival in late June as a scholar.

Created by the Aspen Institute, a national nonpartisan policy studies organization, and billed as the “nation’s premier, public gathering place for leaders from around the globe,” the festival attracts 3,000 attendees over 10 days to discuss ideas and listen to experts from across disciplines debate and offer insight into the day’s most pressing challenges.

Mailloux was nominated as a festival scholar by Janet Topolsky, director of the Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group. She was then selected from a highly competitive pool to be one of 300 from around the world to attend as a scholar. The scholarship grants her free admittance and lodging to a three-day segment of the festival at a value of more than $4,000.

In her more than five years as program officer at Hutchinson Community Foundation responsible for grantmaking and community leadership, Mailloux has worked with local and regional partners to effect positive systems change in early childhood care and education, the local economic ecosystem, the built environment, public art and placemaking. In addition, she has helped to create innovative strategies to inspire transformational collaboration, experimentation and civic leadership. She has also served in roles on committees and boards, including Young Professionals of Reno County, Kansas Association of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health and the planning committee for the National Conference for Growing Community Foundations, among others.

In 2013, she co-founded Talk20 Hutch, a biannual forum for the exchange of ideas and stories at the Hutchinson Public Library, where 10 community members have 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide to tell a story.

A Hutchinson native, Mailloux has degrees in English and literature from Hutchinson Community College and Kansas State University and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Kansas. Before coming to the community foundation, she served for three years as assistant director of the nonprofit literary organization Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, South Carolina. While there, she edited and marketed award-winning books and participated in community building and creative placemaking projects. Her poems and essays have been published in various journals, including Flint Hills Review, Touchstone and South Loop Review.

She lives in Hutchinson with her husband, Phillip, and their three children.

Kari Mailloux