by Peggy High '55
Colorado resident Kip Hughes ’65, who has hiked through the mountains of Nepal, has creatively put her love of walking and outdoor activities to use to advance the causes to which she has devoted much of her life, many of which focus on improving social, health and economic circumstances for women.
Kip has done a three-day walk with survivors of breast cancer, planted trees and shrubs in the inner city with the Girl Scouts and taught disabled children how to ski. She organized a walk through Denver’s streets in which both girls and boys raised funds for Planned Parenthood’s teen sex-education programs.
Though she went to boarding school in England and completed her formal education at Bradford Junior College and in Greece, it was examples set by her family members and her early experience at Chapin that inspired Kip to take up the initiatives that mean the most to her: developing a new generation of female leaders and helping women, through education, to achieve economic self-sufficiency.
“Most of the women in my family worked, and all volunteered,” Kip recalled. “As for Chapin, I came away feeling that there was nothing I couldn’t do.”
Her accomplishments suggest that her intuition was correct. When Kip moved to Colorado to work in banking, after a long career in California’s aviation industry, she quickly made the financial needs of women her priority. For the United Bank of Denver, she created the Women’s Banking Program, a “bank within a bank” that held seminars to teach women and children about money and fostered ties with women’s organizations, such as the Colorado Women’s Bar Association.
The program also offered no-cost office space to advance the closely related work of a foundation to which Kip has devoted much of her own time and energy: the Women’s Foundation of Colorado.
The organization aims to ensure “that every woman in Colorado is economically self-sufficient and every girl in Colorado is on the path to economic self-sufficiency.” Kip joined its board and served for six years, evaluating requests for funding and tackling public-policy issues such as pay equity, health care, education and training.
“One of the wonderful things about working at the bank and being on the board at the same time was that the work at both places was mutually compatible,” Kip said. The dual perspective helped her “to understand what was going on in the communities where we had banks and where the Women’s Foundation also had interests.”
Kip regards her volunteer work as a “story,” and one that she is eager to impart: “The more times you can tell the story about the importance of being involved in your community and about those things for which you have a passion, the better it is not just for you, but also for your community and for the causes in which you’re engaged.”