Kendra Stearns Drozd spent decades learning what motivates people in advertising, brand management, and executive recruiting. Today, she applies that understanding in a different arena: walking alongside those facing grief, illness, and loss.
The hardest part of grief is often the silence that follows. Friends stop calling. Neighbors stop asking how you are. The meals stop arriving. And the person left behind begins to wonder if what they are carrying is too much for anyone else to bear.
Kendra Stearns Drozd knows that silence. She has lived it. And now, as a commissioned Stephen Minister, she works to break it.
Stephen Ministry is a form of lay pastoral care. Trained volunteers are paired one-on-one with individuals experiencing crisis: divorce, job loss, chronic illness, the death of a loved one, loneliness. The minister does not counsel. She does not advise. She listens. She shows up. She sits with whatever the person is feeling without trying to fix it.
Kendra has been doing this work since 2012. She meets with individuals regularly, sometimes for months, sometimes for years. The relationships are confidential. The structure is intentional. The purpose is not resolution but accompaniment.
She describes the work as carrying someone through a difficult season simply by being present. That, she says, is what others did for her during some of the hardest years of her own life.
A Career Built on Understanding What People Need
Before she became a Stephen Minister, Kendra spent more than a decade working in roles that required her to understand human behavior. She began her professional life in advertising at Lois/EJL in Chicago, working on accounts for quick-service restaurants, hardware, and automotive brands. One project involved coordinating costumed Colonel Sanders characters for a KFC product launch across the city, including appearances at Cubs and Blackhawks games.
After several years in advertising, she enrolled at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, where the collaborative culture suited her. She traveled extensively during that period, visiting Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, and the Caribbean.
After earning her MBA, Kendra joined Kraft Foods as a Senior Associate Brand Manager. She worked on Kraft Singles and a new dinner kit product called FreshPrep. Her role included in-home ethnographic research: observing families during after-school routines and dinner preparation to identify gaps in the market and opportunities for new products.
She recalls that the work reminded her that people do not live the way spreadsheets say they do. Real life is messier, more emotional, and more context-dependent than data alone can reveal.
Later, she transitioned to executive recruiting at Bloom, Gross & Associates, a boutique all-women firm focused on consumer packaged goods marketing. The role allowed her to work from home three days a week, spend one day in the Chicago office, and take Fridays off. It was a schedule that worked, for a time.
After the birth of her third child, she stepped away from full-time work entirely. She had four daughters. Raising them became her primary focus.
The Thread That Runs Through Everything
Kendra reflects that understanding people has been the constant across every role she has held. In advertising, she needed to understand consumers. At Kraft, she needed to understand customer behavior. In recruiting, she needed to understand both candidates and employers. As a Stephen Minister, she needs to understand what someone is experiencing and how to support them without imposing her own agenda.
The skill set is the same. The application has shifted.
She also acknowledges that the hardest lessons in empathy came not from her career but from her own life. She experienced multiple miscarriages. She navigated the isolation and grief that often accompany infertility and pregnancy loss. She learned what it felt like to carry pain privately, to move through the world as though nothing had changed when everything had.
There were people who showed up for her during those years. They did not try to fix anything. They simply continued to call, to ask, to sit with her. That, she says, changed her. It made her want to give that same kind of support to others.
What It Means to Care Without Curing
Stephen Ministry operates on a foundational principle: Stephen Ministers care for people, but only God cures people. The distinction is deliberate. It protects both the minister and the care receiver from the burden of expecting outcomes that are not theirs to deliver.
Kendra explains that people are often carrying far more than anyone realizes. Sometimes what they need most is not someone trying to solve their problems. They need someone willing to sit with them, listen to them, and walk beside them without judgment.
The work is not dramatic. It does not lend itself to before-and-after stories. Healing, when it happens, usually happens slowly. Sometimes the most meaningful thing a Stephen Minister can do is continue showing up.
She believes the same principle applies outside of formal ministry. You do not have to be trained to care for someone. You can check in on a friend. You can listen instead of giving advice. You can make someone feel less alone.
What matters, she says, is consistency. We live in a culture that moves fast. But most people in crisis do not need speed. They need presence.
Faith, Family, and a Life Shaped by Service
Kendra grew up in Glencoe, Illinois, where she attended New Trier High School and trained year-round in tennis. At age nine, her parents asked her to choose between tennis and swimming. She chose tennis. She attended Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy during summers, competed in tournaments, and became captain of the varsity girls’ tennis team her senior year, playing number two singles.
Her faith was nurtured at Glencoe Union Church, where she met her grandmother most Sundays. From fourth grade through high school, Mr. and Mrs. Javore shaped her spiritually and emotionally through Sunday School, choir, youth group, retreats, and service projects. They later babysat her. She later babysat their children. Mrs. Javore became a minister and officiated her wedding.
Some of her favorite memories are from summer camp, where she was first a camper and later a counselor. She loved the multi-day canoe trips, pitching tents, cooking over open fires, and hanging food packs in trees to keep bears away.
She attended Williams College, where she studied English with a concentration in art history and psychology. She continued to play tennis. Later, at Kellogg, she thrived in an environment built around collaboration.
Today, she lives in Bluffton, South Carolina. She plays pickleball. She enjoys scuba diving and travel. She has a cocker spaniel. Her daughters are grown.
She describes success differently now than she once did. It is quieter. It is not about résumé milestones or professional recognition. It is about knowing she spent her time on things that actually mattered.
The Discipline of Attention in the Life of Kendra Stearns Drozd
Kendra has also learned that productivity is not about packing as much as possible into a day. It is about giving full attention to whatever she is doing. That shift in thinking did not come easily. It required stepping back from the kind of achievement-oriented life she had built in her twenties and thirties.
Tennis taught her that improvement does not happen overnight. You get better by practicing, making mistakes, and showing up again the next day. The same, she believes, is true of relationships and of service.
Travel, too, has shaped her perspective. It pushes you outside your comfort zone, she says. It teaches you how differently people live and think. It broadens what you consider possible.
But perhaps the most important lesson has been this: healing usually happens slowly. You cannot rush it. You cannot manufacture it. What you can do is show up. You can listen. You can be willing to sit in the discomfort with someone else.
That willingness, Kendra believes, is what most people are missing. Not because they do not care. But because they do not know how to stay present when there is nothing to fix.
Her work as a Stephen Minister is built on that willingness. So is the life she has constructed around family, faith, and service. She is not trying to change the world. She is trying to walk beside the people in front of her, one conversation at a time.
