Meet Kate Turpen

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kate Turpen. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kate below.

Hi Kate, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

Ever since I was young, I knew my life’s work would revolve around helping others – but in what capacity, I wasn’t sure. I began my college journey wanting to be a high school history teacher; I loved telling stories, uncovering long forgotten facts, and my history teachers had always been included in my line-up of personal role models. However, when time constraints were layered on and I was asked to prioritize content instruction over relationship development, I knew I had to find a role more congruent with my aspirations. Participating in the University of Vermont’s graduate School Counseling program, I found that position. School counseling offered time to foster interpersonal relationships, the scope to teach social-emotional content, and the personal development that I needed as a human being. Completing a counseling program was the most worth-while and most challenging accomplishment in my young life; it required a commitment to healing myself, discovering then unlearning implicit biases I held, and building capacity to hold others’ hurt.
In my first 3 years as a school counselor I became the advisor of 2 elementary level Civil Rights Teams and created the Queer Educators Collective in the Lewiston Public School district, co-chaired Maple Run Unified School District’s Equity Team and Gay/Straight Alliance, and earned certifications in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Grief Work through the American School Counselor’s Association. From the beginning of my career, I demonstrated a clear pursuit of celebrating diversity, investing time into my school community, and providing space for brave conversations. Unfortunately, as a queer educator in public schools, I was not immune to the rising levels of bigotry and homophobia happening in Maine in 2022/2023. Amid book banning attempts and imagined attacks on parental rights, I was mischaracterized and targeted by the Maine Wire – an inflammatory, right-wing publication. After leaving the public education sector, I really wasn’t sure what my purpose was anymore. I had done so much good and had been abruptly stopped. I took a few months to rest, repair, and recover before setting out as a founding member of Windham Raymond Pride, a non-profit focused on uplifting our LGBTQIA2S+ neighbors and creating spaces to build community with our allies. This work propelled me into volunteering on a few local school board campaigns and solidified my need to pursue advocacy work professionally. All of my experiences revolved around helping others but each placement felt just uncomfortable enough that I couldn’t settle. It took a few years but I found a professional role that gives me boundless opportunities to facilitate community growth and help young people make the change they want to see in their world!

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I’m very proud to work as a project director at Disability Rights Maine, a non-profit focused on policy change and eliminating barriers for people with disabilities to meaningfully be included in their communities. My role is to invest time into developing a youth movement, as waiver services for youth will be changing in 2025. The Lifespan Waiver expands the starting age of services from 18 to 14! This means younger Mainers will be able to take advantage of resources and funding to lead fuller lives! In the onboarding process, it became glaringly obvious that in all my civil rights work and focus on diversity, that I hadn’t clearly considered ability or neurodiversity in that scope. I read recently that 16% of the global population identifies as disabled, although this number is likely higher (due to limits in the survey process and/or hesitancy to disclose). Disabled people occupy every social group and movement but rarely have a “seat at the table” where decisions are being made. Learning how to be an accomplice to the disability justice movement is necessary for any transformative change work that I want to have a part in, because the future is disabled.*
*Borrowed from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha who borrowed the phrase from Alice Wong, both disability activists

I’m committed to growing Windham & Raymond Pride into an inclusive, welcoming space that can shift the tide in my small town. When one drives through Windham or Raymond, pride flags displayed in businesses can be counted on one hand. Windham High School cancelled 2024 Day of Silence because there wasn’t enough student or staff participation. At one school board meeting last year concerning banning GenderQueer, a student was sharing their experience with suicidal ideation and sharing how they found comfort and safety in a book…one of my neighbors interrupted with ‘why don’t you [kill yourself]?’ The behavior I saw in my neighbors was more than unacceptable, it was deplorable, but I could not stay silent and hope “something would change.” Alongside another founding member, Windham & Raymond Pride was born to stand up for our queer neighbors, to make space in our hostile, small-town climate for queer joy and connection. After receiving vitriolic attacks on social media and one in-person incident, and out of an abundance of safety, we had to cancel our drag line-up at our inaugural Pride. But we persisted. We planned and executed a family-friendly community day of celebration! Guests came from all over Maine and few from other states, once they had seen the articles outlining the attacks on our Queens. We saw over 400 participants – single folks, families, teenagers, all walks of life represented. Our event, titled Together We Rise, was a moment in time that I knew facing ignorance head on through community building was a role I was meant to fill.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Without question, resilience has had the *most* important impact on my life. My father passed away when I was 7, leaving my mom and I until her death when I was 25. Finding my identity after parental loss was a challenging path, but my internal commitment to continuing on despite challenges and set backs had me moving one foot in front of the other. I could have given up plenty of times throughout my life, especially when I had to leave my graduate program to become my mom’s caregiver. Despite the emotional weight I was carrying, I knew I deserved to give myself every opportunity to succeed. Following her death, I returned to my program and finished with honors.

The second quality that has had a large impact on my life is expressing gratitude often and loudly. I recall being a negative teenager – ornery, angry, and uninterested. UVM professor Lance Smith had our graduate class routinely practice gratitude checks and assign readings about the psychology of gratitude. Because I was exposed to the study of gratitude during a period where I was already expanding my knowledge, it has become my own practice and I have felt the benefits long-term from finding the positive and expressing thanks. Being able to see positive take aways has made conflict management and resolution much easier and in turn, I’ve become a more accountable person.

The last quality I want to name is humility. As an only child, but speaking only from my own experience, the center of the universe revolved around baby Kate. I thought I knew everything and would be the first (and loudest) to speak when a question was asked. Early in my journey with equity work, that belief was confronted and shattered when I was told that I was going about the work entirely wrong – by someone in the community I was trying to help. This woman told me that I had to start by asking the community experiencing harm what they needed and how I could best support, not leading with my ideas. This moment reframed my aspirational allyship and I began to shift to put others’ experiences/voices/feelings first.

The best piece of advice that I can offer would be to invest emotionally in people. Build relationships with folks who are different from you, establish trust, have hard conversations. Apologize, be transparent if you’re cancelling plans, hold yourself accountable. When you invest in others, you have reasons to be your best self and the space to be your worst self. We all need places and people we can let our guards down with, who we can be fully ourselves with. When you find those people, pour care into them!

Before we go, any advice you can share with people who are feeling overwhelmed?

When I’m overwhelmed, I hear myself say the words “I’m the worst” and it *almost* feels true. I relate the voice in my mind to being a villain, whispering negative phrases to me. Some days the villain wakes up stronger than me; the villain tells me that I don’t have good ideas, I am unreliable and inconsistent. But other days, I wake up stronger than the villain. I’m able to quiet that voice with loving wishes and affirmations. I can tell myself that I’m the best that I have so I better believe in me. Taking my negative self talk and turning it into a character has given me some space to confront it. I don’t have this negative feeling about myself that I can’t control, instead I can talk to it and sooth it. I can turn my day around if I take control of the way I think and the words I say to myself.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.windhamraymondpride.org