Junior League of Long Beach

Description

Award to be presented at Annual Meeting, Wednesday, May 24, 2023

There’s not one area of the Junior League of Long Beach that this year’s Helen D. Newcomb recipient has not touched with her infectious passion. Kirsten Larsen commits completely to any task or cause she chooses and becomes an agent in solving any challenge that arises. A member for 33 years, she originally joined the Junior League of Colorado Springs in 1991. We are lucky she re-located as a provisional member and transferred her membership and talents to our Junior League community.

In her first active year in Long Beach, she helped bring Christmas in April (now known as Rebuilding Together) to the Long Beach community as a Junior League project focusing on helping senior citizens repair and rehabilitate their homes. What started as a Junior League placement with Rebuilding Together, led to a commitment with that nonprofit lasting nearly 30 years on both the local and national level.

Over the years she has chaired numerous committees including Research and Evaluation, Administrative Council, Ways & Means, High Tidings Newsletter, and was a member on many other committees. She served on the Board of Directors as the Community Vice President to help usher in a new project focus area for our League in 2002 (Adopt-A-School as a signature project), and has mentored many Junior League emerging leaders in a Sustaining Advisor capacity.

Her Sustainer status has not affected her level of League involvement, in fact, you might say her involvement has blossomed. She demonstrated she was as ACTIVE as ever when she volunteered to serve on a multi-year Membership task force and is currently on the New Member Onboarding ad hoc committee. On the Sustainer Council, she has chaired and coordinated key events, tallied the success as the treasurer, and currently leads the Council as the Chair.

Always one to say “yes,” she is a strategic development advisor for The Women’s Symposium of Southern California (WSSC), and has sponsored the American Association of University Women (AAUW) Long Beach Branch, inspiring 250 middle school girls to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) opportunities. Since 2018, she finds time to serve on the Board of Directors for the Alamitos Heights Improvement Association (AHIA), an all-volunteer organization made up of homeowners and residents dedicated to maintaining and improving the quality of life in the neighborhood.

With an impressive community résumé already catalogued, it might be surprising to learn that she is also a wife, mother of three, and had a full-time job during this time. She continues to challenge herself, by learning to speak Japanese, plus she is a vocalist and percussionist for the band Barefoot Rider.

She has a daughter and twin boys who are all now pursuing college degrees. Her twin sons joined Scouting when they were young boys, and both earned the organization’s highest level of Eagle Scout. Not one to stand by and watch, she adopted the Scouts into her fold. Today she is not only an Assistant Scoutmaster, she is a Patrol Advisor leading a group of Scouts through their scouting career, she has also been Executive Secretary on the Board, and she also sits on the Council Board of Directors. She is a registered Merit Badge Counselor, teaching a variety of badges, including citizenship in the community, sustainability, backpacking, hiking, astronomy, weather, pets, sustainability, and entrepreneurship. Kirsten even persuaded her husband Steve to become a snow ski Merit Badge Counselor.

Kirsten and her daughter have volunteered at the spcaLA nonprofit animal welfare shelter for nearly five years, logging over 200 hours helping cats and dogs in need.

As an entrepreneur, for the last 30 years she applied her Junior League training to build and strategically grow Diversified Technical Systems (DTS), a high-tech company that manufactures miniature data recorders and sensors for crash, blast, and injury biomechanics testing. Customers around the world including NASA, SpaceX, GM, Honda, Toyota, Tesla, top universities, and the US Army all rely on DTS solutions for critical testing. Her passion for learning and leading allowed her to do virtually every job in the company from customer service to CFO.

Unbeknownst to her employees, they have been trained the Junior League way, as Kirsten trains staff on useful skills including facilitation, public speaking, how to run a meeting, and more. Always mindful of creating equitable policies that work on a global scale, Kirsten also helped set-up the DTS Seal Beach headquarters, Michigan Tech Center, and international Tech Centers in the UK, France, Japan, China, Korea, and Asia-Pacific.

She is as generous with her time as she is with her financial donations and in-kind support, including regularly donating excursions on her Duffy boat and many fundraising auction items.

For her breadth and depth of volunteerism, and tireless expression of the Junior League mission in everything she does, we name Kirsten Larsen the 2023 Helen D. Newcomb Award winner.