Earlie M. King has been named the 2007 Distinguished Alumni. She will be recognized at the Ivy Tech Northwest 38th Annual Commencement Ceremony on May 5 at 11 a.m. at the Genesis Convention Center, One Genesis Center Plaza, in Gary.

King graduated from Ivy Tech in the accounting program in 1984 with high honors and was selected as the “Most Outstanding Graduate in Business Science”. After graduating, she taught part-time at Ivy Tech, earned her bachelors in accounting from Calumet College in 1987 and her MBA from Indiana Wesleyan University in 1991. Upon receiving her MBA, she moved to Las Vegas, Nevada where she taught at both the Community College of Southern Nevada and the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

In 2001, she became director for the Workforce Investment Act Project at the community college and wrote grants and developed programs to help the community in Las Vegas. In 2002, she was named the senior neighborhood programs officer for the City of Las Vegas where she oversees federally funded land acquisition, new construction and rehabilitation projects. She attributes the basic skills in accounting she received from Ivy Tech to her success in writing federal grants.

Her grant writing skills have helped many individuals and families in the Las Vegas area obtain or maintain stability and self-sufficiency. Her favorite projects include:

• Operating a Department of Labor grant that has enabled hundreds of laid-off workers from the Nevada Test Site to obtain training and job development services.
• Implementing a tenant-based rental assistance program that provided rental assistance to Hurricane Katrina Evacuees.
• Project management for an apartment complex that is being constructed on a former homeless shelter site. This project will eventually provide 200 apartments for previously homeless individuals and families.
• Rehabilitation of the Blind Center of Nevada

Along with those projects, she volunteers with a program she initiated last September called Saturday Character Education, for children three to eleven years of age. King says, “Whether as a volunteer or through my employment, I will always be somewhere helping somebody move forward.”