Lexington, KY - During her college career, which focused mostly on literature and humanities, Janet Isenhour didn't suspect that she would one day be balancing checkbooks, managing a budget, and overseeing the staff of one of Lexington's most cherished non-profits. But when Laurie Bottoms, a colleague at the University of Kentucky, approached Isenhour in 1992 about coming to work as the assistant director at a soon-to-open literacy center, Isenhour left her teaching position at UK to embark on something completely unknown.
"It sounded like an adventure," Isenhour recalls. As the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning approaches its 20th birthday next year, Isenhour looks ahead to a milestone in her own career: retirement. She is set to leave her post at the end of the year and looks forward to "living the writer's life" and spending more time with her family, which includes her husband, Larry, an architect; two adult children and their spouses; and six grandchildren, all of whom Isenhour claims are "destined to be readers and writers."
Isenhour is extremely grateful for the help she has had along the way, especially looking back to those early days when she found herself newly in the director's chair and wishing she had taken some accounting classes in college. She credits the non-profit and board management courses offered at UK and United Way, as well as the diversely talented Carnegie Center board members and staff, for much of the organization's success. Bottoms, the first Carnegie Center director, provided Isenhour with a strong example to follow and a leadership style that Isenhour looked to when crafting her own.
"She was a really important mentor to me in many ways. Obviously, she gave me the chance to work here, which was valuable, but she just had a different take on how you run a business or a non-profit, and it felt really compatible with my own comfort level in working with people," Isenhour said. "She would always bring a poem to our weekly staff meeting, and there seemed to be something so civil and civilized from that habit. I just learned a lot from her."
The Carnegie Center's mission is multi-faceted, focusing on youth and family services (day camps, family fun nights, a free after-school tutoring program); programs geared toward "lifelong learning" for adults (with courses that include film criticism, grant writing, creative writing, computer literacy, foreign language and more); and arts engagement, with a particularly strong focus on literary arts. Isenhour encourages all of her staff members to both teach a class and take a class, in order to be better in touch with people's learning needs and to experience what it feels like to be a novice at something.
As the board continues its search for Isenhour's successor, Isenhour says some of the most important aspects of her job include fundraising and figuring out how to meet the community's needs with the resources at hand. The Carnegie Center has not yet had to cut any funding, due to years of diligent bookkeeping, strong community support and creativity in finding new sources of funding - the organization received a $10,000 Metlife Innovative Artist Space Award in 2009, a national grant awarded to only six organizations across the country.
While she says she will miss her staff, which she calls "a second family," Isenhour looks forward to focusing on finding an agent for her recently finished first novel, "Old Beauties," which takes place in a Kentucky city "eerily similar to Lexington." She has no doubt that the organization will continue to flourish in her absence.
"My dad really brought me up to believe that nobody is indispensable," she said. "I think the Carnegie Center has a terrific mission, a very strong board, a wonderful staff, and they will be just fine. It will go on being a wonderful organiza-tion because it is so mission focused."