KCR boss prepares to retire
Photo: Trevor Walker Photography
Kelowna Community Resources is looking for a new leader after Ellen Boelcke on Wednesday announced she will be retiring later this year.
Boelcke, who has been KCR’s executive director for the past 14 years, will officially leave the organization on Sept. 30. She plans to dive into new adventures, to travel and to explore.
“This is truly a bittersweet moment for me,” Boelcke said in a press release. “I love this organization and the people I get to work with and to serve. It has been my absolute honour to lead KCR. Now it is time for me personally to move on to my next adventures. The announcement of my retirement is to allow for the successful succession of the organization to its next executive director and to allow the board of directors the time to identify that person.”
KCR’s mission is to create diversity, collaboration and resourcefulness by tailoring services to meet community, family and individual needs. It focuses on four main areas of service: immigrants, employment, community, and family and adoption. Over the last 14 years Boelcke has grown KCR from approximately 25 staff and a $1.4 million budget to a team of more than 100 employees with an annual budget of $10 million.
“What is truly remarkable is that what fuelled this growth was not an expansion of our service mandates,” KCR board chairman David M. Brown said. “Rather this growth was based on a collaborative community model, focusing on our own core competencies and developing community partnerships to identify and address serious gaps in the region’s social structures and to meet emergent and critical needs.
“Ellen has also excelled at successfully accessing funding to meet these gaps, to steward the programs to be participant-centred and to ensure the organization remained stable and well-managed. We are very grateful to Ellen for what she has done for KCR, and so now we need to allow her to graciously retire, as much as we don’t want to see her leave.”
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