Breaking Down Barriers and Changing Lives

Breaking Down Barriers and Changing Lives

Katie has no hesitation jumping into a forklift and showing every man and woman around her the ropes. She’s no stranger to breaking down barriers and striking down any misconceptions that come her way about a woman’s place in the warehouse.

For the past eight years, Katie has used her skills to LIFT her community through a unique Freestore Foodbank program that provides free hands-on job training and certification for unemployed and underemployed tristate neighbors. Katie is the program manager of LIFT the TriState, combining her master’s degree in education with her mastery of heavy machinery.

Katie didn’t start out planning to teach heavy machinery. “I fell into it,” she says. Katie was hired by Cincinnati State to work in business and career development, and her focus was students going into the machinery industry. She decided she could better help them if she had a better understanding of what they do. So, she learned how to operate forklifts.

When the position to teach and manage LIFT opened at Freestore Foodbank, “it was a no-brainer,” Katie says. “I never thought when I got into education that this is what I would do.” She says it might be a weird combination of skills, but it works for her, and it certainly works for the people she helps, too.

Before coming to Freestore Foodbank, Katie says she understood only a small piece of the work we do here. She didn’t fully appreciate the extent of our work to end hunger, but she also didn’t fully understand the life experiences of many of the neighbors we serve. “Sometimes I feel like I want to put myself in their shoes, but I can’t because I wasn’t raised the way they were and didn’t grow up in the neighborhoods they grew up in,” she says. “The things they’ve had to experience in their lives are things I would never have to deal with. When I think about it, the empathy kicks in and gives me a better perspective of why we do what we do.”

And while Katie takes pride in helping everyone who participates in the LIFT the TriState program, there’s an extra-special feeling of encouraging more women to join what has historically been a very male-dominated industry. “I just want to make sure it’s not in the back of people’s minds that women can’t do this. Changing that dynamic is what I want to do,” she says. “Every class, we’re starting to see more and more women enroll.”

Your support helps LIFT up women and all of our neighbors in the tristate area. You help provide food AND the tools families need to build a brighter future.