Miss Virginia Volunteer Kate Clatterbuck Competes For National Crown After Year Of Service

VIRGINIA — Kate Clatterbuck, the reigning Miss Virginia Volunteer who was crowned in August 2022, has spent the past 10 months traveling around the state, seeking to bring communities together through volunteerism.

In two weeks, Clatterbuck will head to Jackson, Tennessee, for the Miss Volunteer America pageant, where she will compete against women from all 50 states and the District of Columbia for the crown.

When compared to the Miss America and Miss USA pageants, Miss Volunteer America is known more as a service-oriented organization that seeks to empower young women across the country.

Clatterbuck, a native of Danville, said she and her fellow contestants for Miss Virginia Volunteer have created a special bond. “We want to be there in support of each other rather than seeing it as a competition,” Clatterbuck told Patch.

After graduating from Roanoke College in 2022, Clatterbuck worked as a middle school teacher in the Albemarle County Public Schools system in Charlottesville. In January, she switched to substitute teaching to give her more time to perform her duties as reigning Miss Volunteer Virginia.

The grand prize for winning Miss Virginia Volunteer was a $10,700 scholarship that Clatterbuck plans to use for graduate school.

READ ALSO: Miss Fairfax Volunteer 2023 Spreads Message Of Service At Blossom Fest

The national Miss Volunteer America is a relatively new organization, created in early 2020. Clatterbuck said she had been familiar with Allison DeMarcus, the founder of the organization, since she created Miss Tennessee Volunteer in 2017 and then went national with the group three years later.

"I really loved her passion for empowerment, scholarship and volunteer work," Clatterbuck said of DeMarcus.

After seeing an advertisement on Instagram for Miss Virginia Volunteer, Clatterbuck contacted the organization and was accepted as a contestant. She competed in Virginia’s inaugural pageant in August 2021 and was the second runner-up. A year later, as Miss Danville Volunteer, she was crowned Miss Virginia Volunteer.

Clatterbuck recalled that entering the pageant world wasn’t a natural move for her. But her time as a student at Roanoke College gave her the confidence to do things outside her comfort zone. She also wasn’t sure if she was ready to take on the added responsibility of spending hours and hours working in the community.

After creating a pros and cons list, she concluded it was worth taking the leap and applying to the organization. Two years later, Clatterbuck will now compete for the national crown in Tennessee.

As part of the volunteer duties and responsibilities as Miss Virginia Volunteer, Clatterbuck joined with Amtrak Virginia in late May to promote volunteerism and actions that bring communities closer together. She went on a rail tour to several towns and cities across the state called the Trains and Tiaras Tour. Among her stops on the tour were the cities of Manassas and Alexandria, as well as Lynchburg, Culpeper, Fredericksburg, Ashland, Richmond and Newport News.

At the Manassas stop of the Trains and Tiara Tour, Clatterbuck was joined by Christina Blake, the current Miss Fairfax Volunteer, who will be competing in the Miss Virginia Volunteer pageant at the Academy Center of the Arts in Lynchburg in August.

Clatterbuck also has created the PowHerful Voices Initiative, which advocates for the inclusion of women's history in the Virginia public schools' history curriculum. She was spurred to create the initiative after learning that Virginia's standards of learning name 77 men but only eight women.

“I created the initiative to go into schools and talk about women in history that we should be admiring,” she told Roanoke College, her alma mater. “That has turned into an opportunity to speak with students about how they can believe in who they are and in the power of their own story.”

On May 6, Clatterbuck hosted a statewide day of service called We Serve With Miss Virginia Volunteer, an initiative that she describes as one of her biggest accomplishments in her year of service as Miss Virginia Volunteer.

She reached out to fellow Miss Virginia Volunteer participants across the state and was able to organize volunteer actions in seven locations, including in her hometown of Danville, where she joined forces with the Danville Otterbots team to pick up trash along the Dan River.

Other volunteer actions were held in Lorton, Charlottesville, Lynchburg, Pulaski, Bedford County and the Smith Mountain Lake area.

Along with traveling to events across the state as Miss Virginia Volunteer 2023, Clatterbuck spends a lot of time on the phone with young women who express interest in the organization.

“When I talk to students, I emphasize the empowerment piece of our program,” she said. “Miss Volunteer America gives so much to women beyond pageantry, with the volunteer and scholarship piece.”

Alexa Knutzen of Utah was crowned the inaugural Miss Volunteer America in 2022. Clatterbuck will be heading to Jackson, Tennessee, on June 16 to prepare for the national competition.

The preliminary competitions begin on June 21, followed by the finals and the crowning of Miss Volunteer America 2023 on Saturday, June 24.