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Distinguished Alumni recognized at Alumni Weekend celebration

Alumni Weekend 2021

As part of this weekend’s Reunion Reimagined, a virtual celebration of Alumni Weekend, The College of Wooster will recognize two alumni with awards at the Annual Meeting of the Alumni Association. The College of Wooster’s Advancement Staff and members of the Alumni Board selected the recipients in recognition of their professional achievements and philanthropic efforts. This year’s Distinguished Alumni include the Rev. Katharine Rhodes Henderson ’78 and Walt Hopkins ’66. Henderson and Hopkins join several alumni who were first recognized during the 2020 event including Thomas Boardman ’70 and Susan Boardman ’71 who received the John D. McKee Alumni Volunteer Award; Alexander Jue ’10 and Kaitlyn Jue ’10 received the Outstanding Young Alumni Award, and Distinguished Alumni award honorees included Larry Jones ’75 and Brenda Major ’72. For more information on Reunion Reimagined, running June 10-12, visit woosteralumni.org.

Rev. Katharine Rhodes Henderson ’78Henderson is president of Auburn Seminary, a nationally recognized leadership development and research institute, equipping bold and resilient leaders of faith and moral courage to build communities, bridge divides, pursue justice, and heal the world. Author of “God’s Troublemakers: How Women of Faith are Changing the World,” Henderson is an internationally known speaker and has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, MSNBC, NPR, and more. Henderson has spearheaded innovative relationship-based programs, including the Auburn Senior Fellows, which includes some of the prophets of our time, and Auburn Media, which amplifies progressive faith leaders’ moral voices on issues such as racial justice, a moral economy, immigration, gun violence, LGBT equality, Islamophobia, and antisemitism. She co-founded Face to Face/Faith to Faith, a multifaith program for teenage leaders from conflict and post-conflict regions globally, and oversaw women’s leadership programming, including the Sojourner Truth Leadership Program, and its overriding theme of loving Blackness. Henderson was named recipient of the Guru Nanak Interfaith Prize for her lifelong passion to create spaces for authentic interfaith engagement. After earning her B.A. at Wooster, she completed her Master’s of Divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary and her doctorate at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is ordained in the Presbyterian Church.

Walt Hopkins ’66A consultant and trainer, Hopkins inspires people to take their dreams seriously, empowers them with the lifetime skills, and coaches them to achieve their goals. For more than fifty years, with a focus on interpersonal skills, influencing, and life designing, he has worked with thousands of people from more than sixty countries. Living in Europe since 1982, Hopkins became a British citizen in 2002. He has taught in high schools, alternative colleges, universities, a race-and-sex-desegregation project, government, business, and industry. In 1983, he founded Castle Consultants International—now part of a worldwide network of interdependent consultants. He has been a member of the National Training Laboratory Institute for Applied Behavioral Science since 1983, and in 2020 was honored as an emeritus member. For the 8th edition of the organization’s Reading Book for Human Relations Training, he contributed chapters on diversity, journaling, and appreciative inquiry. He has worked with many organizations including Apple, Disney, Heidelberg, Procter & Gamble, the Scottish Development Agency, Unilever, and others. Hopkins has served as president of the Class of ’66 for 45 years and worked together with his classmates to support significant gifts in honor of their 25 and 50th reunions.

Posted in News on June 9, 2021.