A Kalamazoo College alumna, who served as the chief strategic communication adviser in Kabul, Afghanistan at the end of Operation Enduring Freedom, will deliver the keynote at K’s Convocation on Thursday, September 9.

Kim Osborne ’93 will help welcome 394 first-year students to the campus as the College opens the 2021-22 academic year at 3 p.m. on the Quad. The annual event serves as the first of two bookends to the K experience with the other being Commencement. President Jorge G. Gonzalez and Provost Danette Ifert Johnson also will address attendees. Chaplain Elizabeth Candido ’00 will provide an invocation.

Osborne was the highest-ranking civilian communication adviser to the Afghan National Security Forces. She is a trusted adviser to U.S. and foreign governments, multinational corporations, international nongovernmental organizations, top-tier universities and large nonprofits. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Myanmar at the Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement in 2018. In 2016, Osborne was an invited speaker at the NATO Strategic Communication Centre of Excellence in Riga, Latvia, where she addressed military and diplomatic leaders from NATO partner nations about how best practices from the commercial sector can be applied in military and diplomatic missions.

Osborne currently is a full professor and the director of the Center for Leadership Development at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, California, the U.S. Defense Department’s premier school for culturally based foreign-language education. Elsewhere, she is on the faculty of the University of Georgia’s College of Education, where she teaches graduate-level courses in leadership and organizational development.

In further involvement, Osborne serves multiple professional and nonprofit organizations. She is a past board member to the National Association for Media Literacy Education, and serves as a founding strategic adviser to the Ethiopian Diaspora Fellowship. She also is a local board member and disaster services responder with the American Red Cross and has responded to several natural disasters including the recent California wildfires, Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Florence in North Carolina.

All students, families, faculty and staff are invited to attend Convocation.