Corinna O’Brien Kelsey is a born and raised Spokanite with ties to Gonzaga Preparatory School and Gonzaga University.

A graduate of both institutions, the 38-year-old is now vice president of advancement at Gonzaga Preparatory School, which has a 2026 fall enrollment total of 825 students. In this role, she oversees advancement throughout the private Jesuit school’s work in fundraising, admissions, engagement, marketing, and communications.

Kelsey is part of the 2026 cohort for Leadership Spokane.

What was your degree program at Gonzaga? Nothing related to what I'm doing. My degree is actually in physical education. I knew I wanted to work in schools, and I was an athlete growing up. I played basketball at Gonzaga Prep — that was probably my best sport. Even when I was in my program at GU, I was coaching when I wasn't participating in sports myself. 

I wanted to be an elementary P.E. teacher. I graduated in 2010, at the tail-end of the recession. Every school only has one P.E. teacher, so there were not many jobs available, and I knew that I wanted to stay in Spokane. A job opened up at Gonzaga University in the admissions office, and both of my sisters had worked in enrollment services. I knew a little about the work and what that entailed, as far as recruiting students and financial aid and all of that. I applied, and the rest is history when it comes to how I ended up in that industry.

What brought you to work at Gonzaga Prep? I was coaching basketball at Gonzaga Prep, and at some point, the varsity basketball coach, who was a longtime administrator at the school, said they were opening a full-time admissions position at the high school. He asked if I would be interested in applying for the admissions director position at Gonzaga Prep. I threw my name in the hat for that, and that's how I landed here. 

I don't think anyone ever thinks about advancement or even admissions — no one puts that on a poster as something that they dream about doing. You get to see the business side of the organization, but you also get to be on the relationships side of the school, too. I loved my time in admissions here, because I worked with a variety of ages of kids.

In 2019, our president at the time wanted to restructure our advancement office, and essentially bring admissions under that umbrella. For us, advancement is admissions, it's marketing and communications, and it is the alumni fundraising portion of it. The president asked me to be the VP at that time of all of those departments, which was a huge honor to be asked to lead the school that means so much to me.  

Since you stepped into this role, how have your engagement strategies changed? We have really spent a lot of our time on relationships. The heart of the work that we do is around building relationships with our constituents, and that could be a prospective student's parent, current family and students, our alumni, or our larger community. 

We're really trying to be intentional, and that takes time. It doesn't happen in just one event or one activity. To build strong relationships takes multiple conversations and meetings. We've tried to build our office around being what we call from the fundraising side "donor-centered," but I think it's individual-centered. It's trying to meet people where they are and engage with them and learn about them.

This past year, we've done some really cool projects around storytelling, because everyone has a story. They want to tell us their story because it points back to the good of what Gonzaga Prep meant to them, and they're able to point out different values or things they learned along the way. That's been a focus this past year, as we've built those relationships and had opportunities to build relationships, is to really listen to their stories.  

Thinking back over the course of your career, what's been a difficult moment you can point to that helped you grow as a leader? Everyone has a perspective, and everyone has a different opinion about how to navigate things. That was amplified during COVID — people had opinions about how we should operate as a school, or at times alums feel that Gonzaga Prep is just as much theirs as it is the current students'. COVID happened so early in my career in this position that it was a really good — and very intense — lesson. 

People just want to be heard. Being able to navigate conflict, listening, letting people have their opinion and letting them have an opportunity to voice that in some capacity has been something that I've had to learn over the course of the last seven years. I think my biggest thing now is that when people give us feedback or want to tell us about something, all I think is, "Wow, these people care." They're paying attention to what we're doing, and we should be honored. 

This is what we want — we want people to pay attention to the work that we're doing. So if someone has those opinions, I think it really shows us that our work matters.

Has there been a more recent time when you applied that lesson? We're in the middle of a presidential transition. Our president is leaving to go Eastside Catholic, over on the West Side. Much like for any organization, change can be hard. 

When it comes to navigating those changes, people's anxiety rises. The world that I'm living in right now is engaging parents and alumni and benefactors as far as finding out what they want out of Gonzaga Prep in the future. What do they think the school needs in the next leader? Everyone is going to have a different perspective. A faculty member's idea of what they think our next leader is going to be is going to be different than someone in my office, which is going to be different than the parent. And that's OK. The committee's job is to take all that and synthesize it and make it so that they can identify what the themes are and what type of person we really want.