Three Wartburg College graduates to receive Young Alumni Awards

Wartburg College will recognize three outstanding young alumni for service to their communities with a Young Alumni Award.

The award honors graduates from the past 15 years who are living the four pillars of the Wartburg College mission: leadership, service, faith, and learning.

This year’s recipients are:

Kyle Fleming, a 2012 Wartburg graduate, earned his degree in music therapy. After earning his master’s degree from Augsburg University, he opened his own private practice, Fleming Music Therapy, with a focus on child and adolescent mental health treatment but also including broader community mental health and arts programming. Fleming is a frequent author and conference presenter, sharing best practices in the field. He is an assistant professor of music therapy at Wartburg.

Samantha Pfab Hospodarsky graduated from Wartburg in 2020 with a degree in religion. She is the assistant director of student success and retention for the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. In that position, she has created new onboarding programming to better support transfer students and re-engage the student body at large after semester break. She also oversees the Success Coaching program, a peer-to-peer initiative to support students on academic alert, and serves on multiple committees dedicated to inclusivity and social justice.

Olivia McAtee, a 2019 graduate, earned her Wartburg degree in psychology and sociology. After chaperoning the college’s first May Term trip to Rwanda in 2023, she created a fundraising drive to provide school lunches for students at the Groupe Scolaire Bare in the country’s Eastern Province. This ongoing effort has provided more than 80,000 meals over three years, keeping students enrolled who could not otherwise afford this cost. McAtee is the director of development at SAFE Center of Iowa in Des Moines.

The three honorees will receive their awards at the Celebration of Distinction dinner on Friday, April 10. Tickets are available for purchase. For more information, call the Alumni & Parent Engagement Office at 319-352-8491.