During National Volunteer Week, the Michigan Region recognizes exceptional volunteers like Kate Cragwall.

Growing up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Cragwall moved through Red Cross swimming, life‑saving and first aid classes. “Those things were just part of my growing up in Iowa,” she said. In eighth grade, she was selected for a summer leadership camp for Red Cross youth, a moment that set her on a path she’s still walking.

Today, Cragwall serves as the lead for the mental health team in the West Michigan chapter, covering 12 counties. She is also the regional lead for mass casualty incidents and condolence care for the Michigan Region. This March, she celebrated 25 years as a disaster mental health volunteer.

Her early volunteer work at the Red Cross was hands‑on and community‑based. As a teen, she volunteered in the community and spent summers working as a receptionist at her chapter office, where the executive director became a mentor. She served as a youth representative to the adult board and stepped in during disasters, making sandwiches and delivering them to people filling sandbags along the Cedar River.

She also volunteered as a candy striper at St. Luke’s Hospital in Cedar Rapids and at the VA hospital in Iowa City, delivering flowers, reading to patients and offering comfort to those without family.

Her leadership grew quickly. She chaired her county youth council and, while attending DePauw University, was selected to serve on a national Red Cross board. When her husband was stationed in Tokyo during the Vietnam War, she continued her service as a Red Cross volunteer at the hospital on base.

Cragwall later stepped away from volunteering to raise her family, complete graduate school and begin a career in social work. But in 2001, she returned to serve on the board of the Red Cross chapter in Grand Rapids. After 9/11, she trained as a disaster mental health responder and has led the region’s mental health team ever since.

“I think one of the things that has kept me with Red Cross so long is that volunteers can do real program development,” she said.

In West Michigan, Cragwall helped grow the disaster mental health program and, with colleagues, developed a mass casualty program that trains teams across the state to set up family and friends reception centers after natural or man‑made mass casualty events.

Her work has taken her far beyond Michigan. With deployments to disasters in states such as California, Nevada and Florida, she has gained valuable experience she brings back home to strengthen local response.

Cragwall’s decades of volunteer service reflect the strength volunteers bring to the Red Cross every day, shaping the Michigan Region’s ability to respond with compassion and skill in times of crisis. Her commitment is rooted in the values she has carried since childhood, a belief, she said, that “you make a difference in the world and make the world a better place.”

By Sydney Henry, regional communications manager