April 9, 1937 – May 6, 2022

It  is with great sadness that we in T-1 report the passing of Warren Kinsman, (my room-mate ) from the first wave of English teachers in middle and senior high schools across Turkey beginning in the fall of 1962. He was an exceptional life-long teacher and a wonderful friend, generous with his time be it in Turkey, Washington DC, or in Costa Rica still teaching into the spring of this year. He died  on May 6th of cancer. T-I RPCVs held a Zoom meeting to remember and honor him on May 14th. He was 85 years old. RIP dear friend. Well done.         — Mike Jewell

A Life Well Lived

My brother, Warren Kinsman, departed this world of illusion and returned to spirit today, at age 85 years, 26 days, after leading an extraordinary and exemplary life.

As a high school senior he was voted Class Marshal, and led the procession of his class at graduation. At Syracuse University he was president of his fraternity, and upon graduation became a Peace Corps volunteer in its earliest days. He was sent to Turkey, where after a year he was the first volunteer selected as a volunteer leader for the country’s program. He returned to Washington, D.C., and in 1965 after a short stint working for the Peace Corps, there he began teaching English at Anacostia High School, in the heart of Washington’s ghetto.

In the early seventies he and his good friend Spencer Holland established Project 2000, mentoring inner city boys from age six until they turned eighteen. These were kids from broken homes, many with drug addict mothers and absent fathers who would ordinarily have had little chance to escape the bleak conditions of their childhoods, but as a result of Warren’s and Spencer’s mentoring, over ninety percent of their charges graduated high school and many went on to college.

I lived with Warren for a couple of years in the mid-seventies, and I was frequently amazed that any number of young men, former students of Warren’s, would frequently drop by his house to visit, and virtually every one of them would give me the same assessment – “Steve, if it weren’t for your brother, I’d be dead or in jail.”

Warren retired from his work with Project 2000 in 2004 and moved to San Jose, Costa Rica, where he began tutoring students in English, and after a couple of years he got back into teaching full time. He said his teaching there was a reciprocal enterprise: “I teach them English and they teach me Spanish.”

Warren was also very active in the astrological community and was deeply involved in the establishment and ongoing operations of the NCGR chapter in the District of Columbia.
Godspeed, my brother.      — Steve Kinsman