Special Exhibit

See Exhibit: Karen Hafstad: Images of Service

This collection was submitted posthumously by Karen’s sister, Ellen Hoffman.  Ellen shared this summary:

Karen Margaret Hafstad was born May 5, 1946 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the daughter of George and Margaret (Riggs) Hafstad. She grew up in Middleton, Wisconsin and graduated from Middleton High School in 1964. Karen was active in Girl Scouts, attended the national round-up in Vermont in 1962, and counseled at Girl Scout camps in Wisconsin and Connecticut.

She attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1964 to 1967 and spent two summers with Indian YMCA summer projects on the Rosebud and Cheyenne River reservations in South Dakota. She was a VISTA volunteer in Georgetown, South Carolina in 1968 and 1969 and during this time determined to work in community health programs.

In a scholarship application to return to university, Karen described her time in VISTA:
The other VISTA, a young man, and I covered an entire county attempting to organize a network of groups around various local issues of importance to the black population. The programs started were admittedly non- threatening to the white establishment, but could serve as models of communication and organization for the indigenous black community to build on in dealing with the substantial economic, political and educational issues in their county. Our work involved extensive individual contacts and people in a variety of situations such as with head start parents, Job Corps recruitment, high school and grade school tutors, self-help housing enthusiasts, individual families with health problems, and lots of ordinary street corner-front porch type gossiping.

Being a young, white, Yankee, government, poverty worker in rural South Carolina was challenge in itself and at times a shattering experience. But fifteen months in the VISTA-OEO bureaucracy did not diminish my belief in the feasibility of community organizing. Rather it increased my belief that in addition to empathy and organizational skills, community workers must offer a technical skill of value to the community-one must give to the community and have a place in it before once can organize with the indigenous community and/or the establishment community.
Karen graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1971 with a B.A. in Sociology and in 1972 with a B.S. in Nursing. For 10 years she was a nurse in New Haven, Connecticut at the Hill Health Center and the Connecticut Mental Health Center. She returned to Wisconsin in 1983 to be nearer our elderly parents. She nursed at the Rock County Health Care Center in Janesville and the Clinical Research Unit of Hazleton Laboratories in Madison until 1991.

Karen was a long-time collector of cameras, kerosene lamps, pottery and related items. After our mother died in 1995 Karen worked part- time at an antique mall in Cambridge.

She died December 27, 1999. I am her older sister.

Ellen Hoffmann
King City, Ontario
December 4, 2005