A Classroom That Met Her Where She Was

Kyna Grubb arrived at Catawba as a junior, four days after having her first child. She came not from a traditional path, but from a winding one, UNC Chapel Hill, a modeling stint in Atlanta, Gardner-Webb, searching for a place where she could finally focus and flourish. She found it in Catawba's classrooms. Where Chapel Hill had placed her in lecture halls of 400 to 600 students, Catawba put her in accounting classes with five or six peers, professors who knew her name, and an environment where asking a question wasn't an act of courage, it was simply expected. A presidential scholarship and work-study program gave her the financial breathing room she needed. And when she gave birth to her second child two weeks before graduation, her professors met her where she was, one even came to visit her in the hospital during labor. That kind of care, Grubb says, is not something you forget. It's something you spend a lifetime trying to replicate.

The Ketner Connection

For Grubb, giving back to Catawba has never felt like obligation, it has felt like continuation. She served on the Ralph Ketner School of Business Advisory Board, helped connect Catawba business students to internship opportunities at Rowan Helping Ministries, and spent five to six years coaching juniors and seniors through mock interviews, offering the kind of candid, practical guidance that she once needed herself. The relationship between the two institutions runs deep: the first building at Rowan Helping Ministries was funded through Ralph Ketner, whose Food Lion legacy is woven through Grubb's own story, she grew up shopping there, earned her degree in the school bearing his name, and then built part of her career within the company. That interconnected thread, she says, is exactly what Catawba produces: leaders who don't just succeed, but circle back.

Rooted in Rowan

Catawba has never been just a college to Kyna Grubb, it has been a constant backdrop to her life in Rowan County. Her parents graduated there in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She ran the track on campus after graduation. Her community hosts events on its grounds. She attended plays performed in its auditorium and watched her own high school class graduate there when her school had no auditorium of its own. For Grubb, the campus is not a place you visit, it is a place you live alongside. That deep, decades-long rootedness shapes how she talks about Catawba's role in the region: not as an institution set apart from the community, but as one embedded within it, quietly producing the leaders, volunteers, and collaborators that make places like Rowan County thrive.

Every Gift Finds Its Place

At the center of Kyna Grubb's approach to life and leadership is a straightforward conviction: that making a difference is not reserved for the prominent or the powerful. She encourages alumni to give not based on the size of their gift, but based on their passion, whether that's funding an internship, mentoring a student, or simply lending expertise to a cause that matters. She reminds smaller donors that their gifts are just as valuable over time. Her legacy, as she describes it, is simple: that she made a difference in her community and built collaboration. For someone who once couldn't see the board in a lecture hall at Chapel Hill, that is no small thing.

Good Goes Further Than You Know

Though retired from her role at Rowan Helping Ministries, Kyna Grubb's investment in Catawba and the community it shapes shows no signs of slowing. Through speaking engagements with accounting students, advisory board service, and years of connecting young professionals to real-world experience, she worked to give others the same foundation that was given to her, one built on personal attention, practical knowledge, and the belief that each individual matters. She is quick to point out that Catawba's impact on her life didn't begin with her own enrollment. It began with her parents, continued through her sister and her son, and extended into the work she led for years. That, she says, is what Good Goes Far really looks like, not a slogan, but a living, generational reality.