The Centralia College Foundation has announced its 2017 Distinguished Alumnus.
Alicia Wicks, who grew up in Centralia and was a 1963 graduate of Centralia College, has been chosen to receive the honor.
She will be officially recognized at the college’s commencement ceremony June 16.
Wicks has an extensive history in philanthropy, particularly in Africa. She follows in her brother’s footsteps. Elliot Wicks was the 27th recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2004.
“My passion is to live with and assist the people I meet by giving them a leg up and hopefully introducing a skill that they can take into their future, whether as a child or as an adult … to show them somebody across the ocean cares about them,” Wicks was quoted as saying in a press release. “As an unofficial ambassador of the U.S., I am pleased to hear, ‘You are one of us.’”
Wicks taught English and African literature while she served in the Peace Corps in Africa shortly after graduating from Centralia College. She then earned her master’s degree in education from Eastern Oregon College and her doctorate from Golden State University, according to the release.
During that time, she taught at a residential school for delinquent boys and a migrant camp.
Wicks passed the California State Bar on her first try and became an attorney for the San Francisco city department for 15 years.
After the death of her father, Wicks returned to Centralia with her three adopted special needs children. For the next 15 years, she administered the new Individualized Certificate Program at Centralia College.
“Wicks believes in giving back to her community as evidenced by her participation in Pope’s Kids Place, Human Response Network and Soroptimist International of Lewis County,” according to the release.
After she retired in 2003, Wicks returned to Africa and worked with Hank and Jenny Kirk at the University of Livingstonia in Malawi, where she assisted with the first graduating teaching candidates ceremony. She returned to Liberia in 2013 to work with girls in the slums of the nation’s capital Monrovia and also at the center for Ebola in Liberia.
Wicks became involved with the “More Than Me Girls School,” which later became an Ebola hospital for the duration of the outbreak. Afterwards she taught young unmarried mothers to sew in Hohoe, Ghana.
Later that year, Wicks returned to Kenya where she lived with a transitional Maasai family, which was “traditional but several steps on the path of modernity, and became part of four families’ extended household on the savannah,” according to the release. She helped traditional Maasai women in mud and stick houses in the bush with their efforts to earn a living with their beaded jewelry and patterns handed down from one generation to the next.
She is the founder and director of Maasai Made, a group of 20-30 traditional Maasai beading women in the bush. Their products are sold in the United States. She’s also the founder and director of Karibu Beading Collective, where purchased beads are made into modern crafts and sold in the United States.
Wicks uses the money from the sales to return to Kenya and further her work. She helps provide food the people can’t grow, sends children to school and helps take care of the herd animals.
