27 Mar Employee Spotlight: Kayle Dietrich
Altruistic at Heart – Kayle finds her niche working for Vail Place
Kayle Dietrich is a uniquely caring individual who has dedicated her professional life to helping others and making her community a better place. Vail Place is fortunate to employ Kayle as the Resident Opportunities and Self Sufficiency (ROSS) Service Coordinator at Dow Towers in Hopkins. Her dedication and work embody the words of her favorite quote by Nelson Henderson: “The true meaning of life is to plant trees under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”
A Community Servant
Even before her position with Vail Place, Kayle was working two meaningful jobs, one as a hospice and home care social worker and one as a guardianship specialist. She says of her experience as a hospice social worker that “it was a privilege and a blessing to be able to help individuals and families through some of the toughest days of their lives.” Professional guardianship also challenged her in new and interesting ways.
However, when she moved to a new residence in a different location, she needed a new job, one with a company she believed in that was doing good work in the community. And that’s when she discovered Vail Place.
Finding Fulfillment
For a little over a year now, Kayle has been working as a ROSS Service Coordinator, which allows her to do much of what she enjoyed about her previous jobs, like group work, one-to-one interactions and community building. Not only this, but she is also expanding her skills in new areas like grant writing and coordinating.
She shared that the most fulfilling part of her job is “knowing I work for a company that really cares about the individuals we support and values its employees. From the top down, I know that our team is committed to doing the hard but good work that needs to be done for our community.”
Though she is not onsite at Vail Place, Kayle describes it as a welcoming, supportive and safe environment. “The clubhouse model is one of mutual support and inclusion, and I feel those things from my colleagues, the directors and the members.” She has never been happier at a job and highly recommends working for Vail Place.
Loving Life
When Kayle isn’t working, she finds enjoyment doing puzzles, playing board games with her partner, and cuddling with her kittens Mixie and Shiloh. She also likes watching movies and TV shows about people with superpowers as well as spending time with family and friends. Some of Kayle’s proudest successes are completing college and graduate school, creating a life with her partner, and beating her grandpa in a March Madness tournament bracket, which she says “only happened once, and it was amazing.”
Kayle is admittedly a bit of an introvert in her personal life, but she is making a significant, positive impact in the lives of so many others in her work with the ROSS program at Dow Towers. She has learned so much from her position, but she says that, more than anything, “this job has taught me the power of the human spirit. We can do incredibly difficult things, and many of the people we work with do them every day. Life is hard, and it is also beautiful.”