About Me

My name is Kathy Olwell, and I am asking for your vote to become the East District City Councilor. I wanted to take a moment to share who I am, what I’ve done, and why I am running.

I’ve lived in Burlington for over three decades (in Ward 1 for 25 years). I raised my three boys here and four of my grandkids currently attend Burlington Schools. My husband and I moved here because of our strong school system and because we love that Burlington does things differently than most communities across the US. I have spent a lifetime trying to make our city safe, livable, fair, and affordable for everyone.

I want to see our city government function, and work well for the people that live here. We have a lot of issues to address and we aren’t going to have adequate partners in the federal or state government for the time being. In order to support the Mayor in getting this city back on track, we’ll need to work together as neighbors, not members of political parties.

I served as our East District
School Commissioner from 2016 to
2023. I am a retired Social Worker,
having worked for both the King
Street Center and the Sara
Holbrook Community Center.
As such, I started the New North
End Youth Center in 1994 under
the umbrella of King Street Youth
Center, in the National Guard Armory adjacent to Hunt Middle School, which is now the Miller Center.

King Street’s program director and I were instrumental in helping the Burlington School District apply for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers Grant which are the Federal funds that support the afterschool programs in all nine Burlington schools. I designed and ran the afterschool program at Hunt MS and the Burlington Middle School Summer Program, a five week program which was tuition free for Burlington and Winooski students.

I serve on the board of the Burlington Students Foundation which supports out of school time programming and holds and administers the Miller/Aldrich Scholarship, a $2,500 scholarship for BHS graduates who attended SA or IAA. I currently serve on the board of Gedakina, a multigenerational endeavor to strengthen and revitalize the cultural knowledge and identity of Native American women and their families from across New England. 

I look forward to learning more about you and how I can best serve the East District as our City Councilor. I’ll be knocking doors and calling folks in the coming weeks, but in the meantime if you have questions please reach out using our contact form here.

Best,
Kathy