Distinguished Alum
KATHEE TIFFT
Single mom turns education
into award-winning career
by Andrea Vogt
THE FAMILIAR SCENE had all the trappings of that classic off-to-college cliché: The mom and dad, sister, and brothers loading up the family car for the annual fall trek to campus.
But what seemed like a typical first-day-of-school story unfolding between Sandpoint and Moscow was anything but ordinary for Kathee Tifft. She was moving down for the spring 1985 semester, but her 1974 Datsun only made it as far as Coeur d’Alene before breaking down. Her family towed it through the snow to a friend’s house and loaded contents into her brother’s van, so she arrived in her dad’s Chevy Impala.
Earlier, her mom and dad had used a year’s income tax refund to pay tuition. “I’ll never forget that gesture,” Tifft said, wiping back a tear.
The refund was always like Christmas in spring, she recalled, money reserved for a special family vacation or to see relatives in Issaquah. That year, it footed the bill for the first member of their family to go to college.
College, a risky investment?
Brittany is one year old.
Some might have called it a risky investment. Tifft, then 23, was an unmarried single mother with a 1- year-old infant whose biological father wanted nothing to do with either of them.
But returns have shown Tifft’s parents acted shrewdly. Faith in their daughter and the hope offered by an education proved right on the money. She finished her undergraduate degrees in child development and home economics education, landed a job as a teacher in the Coeur d’Alene Alternative High School, and eventually got off welfare.
A decade later, she quit her secure job to go back to Moscow, this time with her then teenage daughter, to pursue a master’s degree.
“We attended school twice togeth- er here,” she says affectionately, nod- ding toward now 24-year-old Brittany, who doesn’t miss the opportunity to rib her mom about their former gypsy lifestyle. “I can pack up a household in less than a week,” she jokes, when asked what she’s learned from her mom. Then she delivers her real answer: “Determination.”
Life as a UI Extension educator
Today, Tifft, 46, is a standout UI Extension educator in Nez Perce County. In April she was awarded the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences Alumni Achievement Award for her selfless efforts to make positive change in rural communities.
For years, she expanded a series of programs for Idaho’s elderly, and she recently coordinated an intense outreach effort to help enroll the region’s senior citizens in the new Medicare prescription drug program.
Kathee Tifft and
daughter Brittany in Friendship square.
Now Tifft is a community coach on the Camas Prairie for the UI’s Horizons program, an anti-poverty initiative funded through a $1 million grant from the Northwest Area Foundation (www.nwaf.org), which aims to reduce poverty in 28 rural northern Idaho communities, all with a population between 100 to 5,000 people and a poverty rate greater than 10 percent.
While Cottonwood is the largest town, bringing Camas Prairie together involves also reaching out to a number of smaller communities with their own singular identities, not to mention a prison and a monastery (North Idaho Correctional Institution and St. Gertrude’s Monastery). By coordinating leadership training for residents, Tifft is helping these com- munities take action on issues they’ve identified as most important.
“I’ve got this new joke,” Tifft says. “ … So a nun and two prison guards walk into a leadership training … ”
They started a welcome commit- tee to make newcomers feel more comfortable in the mostly Catholic, German community. A number of ini- tiatives are underway to improve communication, diversify and rejuve- nate the lagging economy, and
address poverty. Tifft is not fond of the word.
Thoughts on her own poverty
“People will say ‘I had to rob Peter to pay Paul,’ or ‘I’m paycheck to pay- check,’ but nobody says ‘I’m living in poverty,’” says Tifft. That’s a word used by professors (and journalists).
However you put it, many rural Idaho counties need a hand with their struggling economies, aging population, and rising poverty.
Through her efforts, Tifft is giving something back to the community, repaying the higher education Idaho’s residents helped give to her. “I am grateful for everyone paying their taxes, and I pay mine.”
Kathee receiving her masters degree in 2001.
College is hard work, but it also a ‘ticket.’
Tifft still remembers the day she took a bus from Sandpoint to Moscow to talk to an advisor about going to college. “I was on that bus thinking, ‘What am I doing? I don’t have money. I don’t know anyone. I have a baby. I can’t go to college,’” she said. “All I wanted was to get a job and get off welfare. My God, I got so much more.”
Her advisor remembers that day, too. Janice Fletcher, UI professor of child, family, and onsumer studies, recalls, “It was a winter day, and I remember sitting there thinking that for her age she had a remarkable sense of purpose. She definitely stood out,” Fletcher said. “She came with a plan and was very resourceful in finding ways to make it work.”
Kathee Tifft
Fletcher advised Tifft through completion of both degrees. She was her master’s degree major professor, which never stopped Tifft from teasing Fletcher about the beat-up Toyota she drove.
“That was another defining moment,” recalls Tifft. “I was scared to death to meet a ‘professor.’ Then I met her, and she was the exact opposite of the rigid judgmental person I expected. She was friendly and helpful. The clincher was when I saw her later that afternoon standing on the driver’s seat of a P.O.S. car, leaning over the windshield trying to scrape off all the snow. I thought, I CAN do this. There are people like me here.
“I just hope I can project out into the world half of what the UI School of Family and Consumer Sciences has given me,” said Tifft. Fletcher has no doubts. “She is one of the most fun persons to be around. She doesn’t back down before big challenges.”
Andrea Vogt, a UI graduate, is a freelance writer/photographer.
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