When Kelsey Catherine Young reflects on her unconventional journey through education, one thing is clear: it’s been powered by relationships, resilience, and a deep commitment to community.
“My journey is a little bit of an alternative approach to education and learning,” she laughs. “I always struggled a bit with school — just being there, feeling under-challenged. But I made the right kinds of relationships with certain educators over time, and that really set me on a different trajectory.”
That trajectory has taken Kelsey across the country, and beyond, into classrooms, Indigenous communities, and digital learning spaces, where she’s made a lasting impact by centering on the needs and voices of learners.
Her academic path began in international relations, though like many students, Kelsey navigated a shifting landscape of potential careers, priorities, and opportunities. Graduating during the 2008 recession, she faced limited options and made a pivotal choice to pursue her Master of Education.
“There was always this idea of teaching in the background,” she recalls. “And that really shifted things quite dramatically for me.”
From the start, her interests leaned toward the person-oriented side of education. “I started doing at-risk youth engagement in urban schools and really loved the journey of the students I was working with, more than the curriculum pieces,” she explains. That realization sparked a desire to deepen her training — albeit in an unusual order.
“I did my Master of Education, then my Bachelor of Education, and then my PhD. It was this weird ping-pong journey,” she recalls with a smile.
Kelsey found a natural home at Queen’s University for her Bachelor of Education. “I had gone to a big commuter school for my undergrad, and I was hungry for something more community-based, more relationship-oriented,” she says. “That drew me to Queen’s.”
Her experience at Queen’s left a lasting imprint. Through her Alternative Practicum, she taught overseas in Mexico, built lasting relationships with faculty, and connected with mentors who remain a part of her life today.
“My associate teacher from Queen’s, Jane MacMillan, is now the auntie to my kids,” Kelsey shares. “We talk every second day. That kind of deep relationship-building was such a powerful part of my time there.”
With limited full-time teaching roles available at the time, Kelsey leaned in once more and embarked on her PhD. It was during this time that she began working closely with Indigenous communities, helping integrate digital tools to preserve language and identity.
“This was around 2011, when people were just starting to see platforms like Facebook and Twitter as tools for mobilization and creation,” she explains. “I worked with Elders who were interested in this technology to capture culture. We were training teachers to collect content and language and cultural elements into digital repositories and lesson plans and, translating it into ways to teach Indigenous culture in math and in English and in other ways.”
Her work eventually brought her to 46 First Nations across Canada — remote, rural, and urban — where she partnered with educators to build resources that were rooted in community and reflective of Indigenous ways of knowing.
Then a colleague working in Nunavik encouraged Kelsey to apply for a leadership role with the Inuit school board.
“They were looking for a director of teacher training,” she says. “I was 29, newly finished my PhD, and very aware of the responsibility I would be carrying — a white woman coming into an Inuit community to help run a program for Inuit educators.” Kelsey shared that this role was deeply relational, and focused on providing support rather than knowledge, and required a lot of listening, trust-building, and humility.
Through this role, Kelsey also worked with Student on Ice Foundation, and created programming focused on Inuit youth and community service, to support their training but also their relationships with their community. All this experience brought Kelsey to Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITP), a national organization representing, protecting, and advancing the rights of Inuit in Canada. Kelsey worked as a senior policy advisor in education, university and poverty reduction, pushing for change, funding, and programming that was focused on enriched learning, well-being, and education.
Kelsey’s incredible journey and breadth of experience have been framed by her fundamental commitment to leading with care, centering community, and building capacity in others.
Now, years later, she continues to be driven by that early realization — that education is, at its best, about relationships. And it all traces back to those early moments of being seen and supported by educators who believed in her.
Kelsey’s career has been meaningfully meandering, and the people she met, including many at Queen’s, helped shape her understanding of what it truly means to serve the learners you work with.
Kelsey’s advice to anyone in the field of education: “You'll never go wrong with relationship building, especially when you're starting out. There's a lot to navigate and a lot of nuances, lots of things that your curriculum can’t help you with, but at the at the end of the day, the most important piece is the relationships you're building and finding that opportunity to get to know your students, colleagues, and community, and what they value and what they care about.”