Autumn Kersey, founder, executive director, board chair and co-director Treasure Valley Children’s Theater LLC/Treasure Valley YOUTH Theater Inc. in Meridian

While Autumn Kersey’s first theater production was when she was 4 years old, she was on stage even earlier: Her mother was in a play while pregnant with her.

As the only child of a single mother with three jobs, community theater became Kersey’s second home. “I fell in love with it,” she says. “Not only because it gave me a place to feel comfortable and explore, it became my family. Theater was my place to figure out what life was all about and what it could be.”

Now, Kersey brings that same opportunity to Treasure Valley children through two production companies: a professional adult company that produces theater for youth, and a nonprofit that provides education and leadership for youth.

Kersey studied theater for two years and then took a year off to become a professional actor. “I stopped having fun, I stopped enjoying it, and I became critical and unhappy,” she recalls. She switched gears and earned a communications degree at Boise State, minoring in theater.

Kersey then ran theater programs for kids through Boise Parks and Recreation Department and Boise Little Theater. “I was good at it, and it made me feel really good,” she says. “It made me feel like whatever environmental or spiritual being exists in the world was working through me, and set me on this trajectory.”

Perhaps, Kersey thought, she should go into education. “I got my master’s, but I determined pretty quickly that the public school environment was not where I would excel.” Instead, she worked in fundraising for Planned Parenthood, and then in advertising sales for the Idaho Business Review, all while keeping her toes in community theater, acting, directing and producing.

“I acknowledged what I had within myself: Passion, talent, and now contacts and the technical understanding of how to create a business,” she says. “Any time I reflect on my crazy weird life it surprises me how everything I’ve ever done in my life has led me to this moment.”

In 2012, parents in the youth summer theater program Kersey was directing told her, “’Autumn, you are so good at this. How can we get you to offer this to our kids all the time?’” she recalls. “It was time to really take this seriously. I was coming up on my 40^th birthday.” First, she formed the professional company and then, a year later, the nonprofit. And she stepped away slowly from her sales job, working part-time for nearly a year. “It was really baby steps the first year,” she says.

Why Meridian? “In 2012, as I was looking around the valley at where the gaps were, Meridian was the only community that wasn’t being served by any theater group,” Kersey explains. In talking to business groups, as well as Meridian’s mayor, she realized Meridian was the place to be. “Families are moving here, and there’s more students per capita than any area in the state.

And so far, so great. But Kersey does not take success for granted, nor does she take all the credit. “I do not do any of this by myself,” Kersey notes. “It’s my dream, but you can’t build it without a lot of support. I’m really grateful to all (who have been there for me) for buying in on the crazy idea of making a living out of art.”