Carol Barnett is a native of Kansas City and graduated from Shawnee Mission North High School. She attended Wheaton College in Norton, MA and earned her BA in Philosophy and minor in Economics. During her second semester senior year, she received a job offer from the General Electric Company in their Construction Equipment Sales Division. Not only was it an excellent training ground, it turned out to be a fantastic way to traverse the United States as she lived in five cities in four years.
In 1985, she moved back to Kansas City to join her family in the wholesale electrical supply business that her paternal grandparents started in 1938. Carol met the love of her life and best friend in the Universe, Tom, in 1989 and they married two years later. In the summer of 1991, Carol left one family business to join another—she became Tom’s business partner in the promotional products industry and worked alongside Tom in sales for the next 20 years. In the summer of 2005, Carol’s dad was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. During the last month of his life, the family engaged Kansas City Hospice & Palliative Care (KCHPC) to help make his last days and passing much easier on all of them. Thanks to a call from a good friend a few months thereafter, Carol started volunteering in a fundraising role with KCHPC. They were building the Hospice House at the time. In the fall of 2011, when Tom and Carol’s youngest daughter was a high school senior, Carol took KCHPC’s respite training course. In the spring of 2012, after a profound experience with a patient, Carol hung up her sales hat to become a full-time volunteer with KCPHC and has never looked back. She found her calling, or perhaps, it found her. Carol dubs herself a “jack of all trades” in the organization. Her roles include respite, fundraiser, Foundation Board member, greeter at both Hospice Houses and The Solace House Center for Grief and Healing, to name a few.
In her spare time, Carol is a math tutor twice weekly via Zoom to a group of eager learners at the Hope Community School in Twapia, Zambia. Hope School is supported by Spark Ventures. She and Tom have traveled there five times since 2015. It was in the fall of 2020 when the pandemic all but prohibited international travel, that Carol started tutoring to four students. Today, along with a handful of other volunteer tutors, over 150 students are reached weekly.
Carol serves on the board of the Jewish Community Foundation and has served on the board of the New Reform Temple, including being Board President for two years. In 2014, she received a Heart of Hospice Award by the Missouri Hospice & Palliative Care Association, In 2018, Carol and her two brothers who also live in Kansas City were recognized as Philanthropist Of The Year by Nonprofit Connect.
Carol’s hobbies include cooking, gardening, traveling—especially scuba diving, and working out, but mostly she loves spending her time with their three daughters, sons-in-law, and five grandchildren.
Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.
Minor Meyers, Jr.,17th – President of Illinois Wesleyan University
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