‘You have to be willing to fail, to fall down and pick yourself back up’
After her high school graduation in 1986, Bourque studied medical technology for a year and a half at Eastern Illinois University before she “found out I absolutely picked the wrong field.” So she took a waitressing job — just for a semester, she thought — at a Ground Round restaurant in Springfield. Then the restaurant chain asked her to become its manager. A semester away from college became 24 years. Ground Round sent her in 1989 to St. Louis to manage another of its restaurants alongside Rick Bourque. He had ties to west central Nebraska through his mother, Kathleen Lute of Ogallala, a St. Patrick High School alumna. “Actually, I did not like him at all when we first got together,” Kathy Bourque said. But she and Rick became engaged while both sought their purpose on a road that led them westward. The couple briefly managed a Grandmother’s restaurant in west Omaha, then moved to Trinidad, Colorado, where Rick studied to be a police officer. But while he applied for police jobs along the Front Range, “we were young and broke.” So the Bourques moved to Ogallala in 1992 to live with his mother and her second hus- band, rancher Robert Lute II, whose family’s Lute Ranch holdings trace their roots back to Keith County’s earliest cattle spreads in the late 1800s. They were still close to those Colorado police jobs. Within a year, though, Bob Lute died — after asking Rick and Kathy, who married in 1993, to stay and run the ranches. “It was before the internet, so I felt I had fall- en off the face of the earth,” Kathy Bourque said. “But I loved it.” Rick Bourque still runs Lute Ranch as well as the Lute Family Foundation, founded from his stepfather’s estate. The latter’s list of local and regional donations includes the Kathleen Lute Public Library now under construction in Ogallala. So much for being a police officer’s wife.
Before his wife would become a foundation manager herself, she had a few career twists left. She worked as an interior decorator at Allen’s Carpet & Furniture and as national marketing manager for Ogallala Down Co. Then the Bourques owned and operated Mailboxes Inc. (later the UPS Store) in North Platte from 1996 to 2014. That’s when she became involved in North Platte community leadership, serving on the chamber board, the People’s Family Health Services board, local and state Business and Professional Women boards, and finally the hospital and GPH Foundation boards. “I got very active in the community when I was owning my business, because I realized that’s how you make or break a business,” Bourque said. “It became mine,” Kathy Bourque said. She resumed college classes in 2012, working mostly online. A bachelor’s degree in busi- ness from Chadron State College in 2015 was followed by a master’s in management and leadership from Western Governors University in 2017. Before that, Bourque took leadership classes being offered through the North Platte chamber by David Bernard-Stevens, then its president and a former state senator and North Platte High School teacher. She credits Bernard-Stevens, who now lives and teaches leadership in Kenya, with planting the seeds of success reflected in But she felt she had more to learn about leadership.
a book she wrote and published this year, “Conquering Busyness.” “I like to think that I’m a recovering P-3 — people-pleasing perfectionist,” Bourque said. “And I’m a procrastinator, so maybe you could call me a P-4. ... “I think that’s what pushes me to think on my feet and step out of that box. You have to be willing to fail, to fall down and pick yourself back up.” When she and Rick sold the UPS Store, she took a year off to focus on her studies. She took live classes at North Platte Community College alongside her online work, putting in 30 credit hours one semester. Bourque also spent 18 months as a West Central Nebraska Development District community developer, “until I decided this was not for me.” But Mel McNea, GPH’s president and CEO, was trying to get her to take an open hospital position as senior director of patient experience. “I kept turning it down, but when it came open a third time, I threw my hat in the ring,” she said. After two years in that role, Bourque took over as the GPH Foundation’s day-to-day leader in July 2018. She can see every wild turn of her first three adult decades leading her to her latest job. “I think sometimes those setbacks that we face are really blessings in disguise,” she said. “It’s hard to see that at the time, but it’s about trusting it’s going to work out.”
Kathy Bourque
Editor’s note: This story was originally published in the Dec. 18, 2019, Telegraph. By TODD VON KAMPEN todd.vonkampen@nptelegraph.com Some people achieve by deciding early what they want and pursuing it with a laser-sharp focus. She followed a long, roundabout path away from and back to a medical setting and from her native Illinois to west central Nebraska, said Bourque, who is the Great Plains Health Care Foundation executive director and one of two scheduled speakers for North Platte’s 2020 Women of Achievement awards banquet Wednesday. “I feel like sometimes I’m more of a downhill skier,” she said. “I kind of know where I’m going, but it takes me a very jagged, zig- zag-way type of thing to get there.” Bourque, 51, has based her professional life mostly in North Platte since 1996 while commuting from Ogallala. She lives just south of the Keith County seat with her husband, Rick, and their son, Cameron, an Ogallala High School sophomore. She has sat on several North Platte com- munity boards, including both GPH and its foundation. But not until 2016 did she finally take a job in the health care field she had first explored in college. And then there’s Kathy Bourque.
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