Lois Kauffman · 2001 Honoree

Lois Kauffman influenced a generation of Capitol Hill children as a pre-k and kindergarten teacher at Tyler and Peabody Schools. Then, wanting to learn more about computers and why she didn’t think they belonged in elementary classrooms), Lois took a sabbatical year to study them. She then went to the computer lab at Eastern High School where she spent nine years (and was “delighted” to discover how wrong she had been about computers). She retired from teaching but quickly found herself doing volunteer work that led her back to full time employment and her present role as Director of Education at the Capital Area Food Bank. It would be an understatement to say that Lois is active.

She learned her respect for hard work as a child, growing up on a farm in Oregon, the youngest of eight children in a Mennonite family. Her father raised grass seeds and barley (and insisted that his barley be used for animal feed not alcohol, which he never touched). Everyone helped with farm chores after school. When, at 16, she was sent “back east” to a Mennonite boarding school in Kansas, she felt like she was “in paradise.” After two years of college in Kansas, she returned to Oregon where she graduated from Oregon State University.

Idealism brought Lois and her young family to Washington in August of 1966. She had married Ivan Kauffman, a fellow student from her Kansas boarding school, when they were both 20. They had two young children and a vague notion of founding a kind of urban service center. They had considered other cities but fell in love with Washington, which they visited on a perfect April day when the cherry blossoms were out. Their idea didn't develop quite as planned but they never regretted the decision to move here. In 1976 they came to Capitol Hill and became active members of St. Peter’s Church.

Lois is bursting with enthusiasm for her new job at the food bank where she promotes a hunger and poverty awareness program for the general public and plans classes in cooking and nutrition for low-income people. She and her staff have recruited well-known professional chefs to give the cooking classes and have offered the poverty awareness program in many schools, both public and private, including the Georgetown School of Nursing, and to other organizations, conferences and professional groups. It was even the entertainment at a Bat Mitzvah.

The urban service center didn’t happen in the way Lois and Ivan had imagined, she says; they realize now that some of their goals were achieved anyway as they communicated their beliefs and ideals to guests and boarders who stayed with them over the years. Their children live by the values of their parents, Eda as a social worker (and raising two young children) and Conrad as a stay at home dad to three kids. Ivan is a writer, poet and journalist whose most recent book, “He Was Here,” was published in March.

As for Lois, she says her career has been a happy match of her talents to the opportunities that came her way. She loved teaching and promoting the idea that children need to be allowed to develop at their own, individual paces. Now she enjoys applying those same ideas and the lessons of a lifetime to education of a different kind.