UOPX alumni spotlight: Kylie Glendenning finds beauty in truth

St. Augustine may have made famous the enduring concepts of truth, goodness and beauty as guiding principles, but their timelessness has been borne out over the centuries by luminaries ranging from Keats to Dostoevsky.

Kylie Glendenning (BSCPSS, in progress) is one more example of the enduring power of this triumvirate. At just 19 years old, she is two months away from completing her bachelor’s degree, which she financed in part with winnings from beauty pageants. Her fast-tracked education is a good thing, because she is a woman with a mission. A couple of missions, actually.

“I want my life to be more than just me,” she says. “I want my life to mean something.” 

Today, Glendenning is already living out her goal. After she completes her bachelor’s degree in correctional support, she plans to start her Master of Science in Counseling. She has worked at a crisis pregnancy center since she was 17, first as a receptionist, then as an advocate who earned the respect of Rich Parker, the retired surgery center manager.

“As a manager, I try to find strengths and build on them,” Parker says. “However, Kylie has many strengths and the drive to perfect each of them. She’s very unusual.”

Glendenning hopes to bring those strengths to a new advocacy role she’s applying for with an anti-trafficking organization. Its mission resonates. While she was earning her associate degree through a dual-enrollment program between her high school and community college, she wrote a research paper on human trafficking in Cambodia. The issue was poignant but also, at the time, far away. Horrible as those things were, they didn’t happen here, right?

Then one day while working at the pregnancy center, Glendenning came across a book, Renting Lacy, that brought the issue home for her. The book was narrative fiction, it dealt with child sex trafficking — and it was set in Glendenning’s hometown.

“That clicked for me,” she says. “This actually happens here.”

Glendenning experienced the profundity of seeing truth in action when she was training for a half-marathon and noticed a homeless woman during her run through a park. Homelessness was not unusual in that area, but there was something about the woman that caused Glendenning to ignore her mother’s voice in her head (“Don’t talk to strangers, Kylie”) and approach the woman anyway.

They started talking, and Glendenning began thinking of substance-abuse programs that could help. Then the woman said something that caused Glendenning’s heart to drop.

“She used this terminology, ‘in the game,’” Glendenning recalls, “and at that point, my brain started veering to a different track, because I recognized that was trafficking terminology.”

Glendenning asked more questions, screening her for having been trafficked. After enough red flags popped up, Glendenning asked if she could call some people from the anti-trafficking organization to help. The woman agreed, and Glendenning stayed with her until assistance arrived.

In Renting Lacy, however, there is no happy ending. “This question started to roll around every night as I went to sleep,” Glendenning says. “Why is no one talking about this? Why have I never heard this until now? Who’s going to do something about this?”

Glendenning, ebullient and articulate, may seem like she’s always been this way. But she recalls a time not long ago when things looked very different for her.

The COVID lockdowns were hard on her she says. She recalls struggling with food and over-exercising, as well as with feeling depressed and aimless.

“I was sitting in my room, and I would stare at the wall for hours,” she explains. “It was just bad. I was very depressed. One day, I was playing sad music in my room when all of a sudden, this Christian song came on out of nowhere. I don’t know where it came from, because I didn’t put it on my playlist, and I was actually mad at first. I was like, ‘What is this doing here?’”

As Glendenning heard the song’s message, something inside her cracked open to let it take root. Like St. Augustine, she experienced a conversion of faith, one that still guides her pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty in life and work.

“I want to see people free,” she says. “I want to see people free from depression, from anxiety, from suicidal ideology, from trafficking — in every capacity. I believe that can happen in my generation, that we can see it.”

Naysayers, be warned: Glendenning is not one to give up easily. And she’s not even 20.

“For Kylie, the sky is the limit,” Parker says. “Whatever she puts her mind to she accomplishes it and accomplishes it with excellence.”

One pathway to accomplish her goals came from an unexpected quarter. While she was in high school, she thought she would enter the Air Force. But as her life began to turn more toward how she could help others, she rethought this avenue. Her high school counselor encouraged her to pursue higher education at a traditional, four-year public university, but that didn’t appeal to Glendenning, who was already earning her associate degree. She was increasingly eager to get to work in a meaningful, life-changing capacity.

Her mother, an immigrant from Mexico, had earned her own bachelor’s degree at University of Phoenix as an adult. Glendenning witnessed her mom go from unsure if she could complete a degree program to becoming a graduate.

Then, the summer before her senior year, she had a dream in which she was meant to attend UOPX herself. She began to research the programs and found the master’s level program in mental health counseling. That, she thought, was the one.

Then she saw the price.

“I had no idea how I was going to pay for my bachelor’s degree. I did not have that money.”

That’s when she came across a flyer for a beauty pageant in Washington state’s Tri-Cities area. It wasn’t her milieu, but winning came with a scholarship, so Glendenning went for it — and won.

She would go on to win Miss Tri-Cities, which is an official preliminary to enter the Miss Washington and Miss America pageants. Glendenning’s scholarships, in conjunction with her transfer credits, began to chip away at the price tag of her college education, which she sees as yet another example of divine grace.

“I didn’t know what I was supposed to do there [to pay for college],” she says. “To be on the other side of that, almost two years later, it’s completely paid off.”

Pageants also gave Glendenning a platform to effect change in the realm of human trafficking. It is her chosen community service initiative, which required her to dig into the topic and ideate ways to combat it.

In this way, truth, beauty and goodness come again to the forefront of Glendenning’s life. Given her accomplishments to date, as well as her dreams for the future, it might be fair to add one more quality to the list: grit.

“If you know you want something in your life, you go for it,” Glendenning says. “Don’t let anyone tell you it has to be this cookie-cutter way. You pave your own path.”

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