When Karen Zink was told she had breast cancer in late 2025, the diagnosis – and the need for treatment – was hard news. Not because she had learned she had a dreaded disease, but because she had to ask for help.
“It was awful. Absolutely, positively awful,” she said. “I love being the giver. Receiving? Whoa, not so much.”
For most of her life, Zink has been the one helping other people, including women going through similar periods of their lives in La Plata County. To be on the other end of that care felt wrong, she said.
The desire to give back to her community led Zink to build a distinguished nursing and public health career and an impressive record of community engagement.
She worked for 55 years as a registered nurse practitioner. She also helped found one of America’s first women-owned women’s health clinics, worked to expand health care education in Southwest Colorado and volunteered in community health initiatives including COVID-19 vaccination clinics.
On the side, Zink and her husband, Jerry Zink, have long been actively engaged in local politics and made philanthropic donations to dozens of community projects.
Zink ended up beating her cancer. And though the diagnosis forced her hand to retire from health care work, she has no plans to stop giving back.
It all started in 1959 with a lamb named Fritzi and sealing envelopes, Zink said.
“My first political engagement was at age 9,” she said. “There was a group of people who were trying to get a county-funded hospital in the community here in La Plata County. In 1959, they were fundraising and sending out mailers.”
Zink’s mother, who worked as a nurse and was also highly engaged in local politics, enlisted her help to stuff and seal envelopes with informative pamphlets in support of the hospital, which were then mailed out to La Plata County residents. That left an impression.
“They were activists who were trying to get another hospital in the community,” Zink said. “They needed their children’s help with the stuffing of the envelopes, the sealing the envelopes, the return address labels.”
At the same time, she enrolled in the La Plata County 4-H Club, where she signed up to raise Fritzi the lamb. Caring for another living creature was a full-time responsibility.
“The implication from my parents was ‘this is for the rest of your life and is not to be skipped,’” Zink said.
She said 4-H hammered home a sense of responsibility. At 16, she got the chance to go to Washington, D.C., with the club to learn more about the country’s government.
The trip – and learning the importance of civic government – stuck with Zink. When she graduated from high school, she decided to go on to a diploma nursing program at Mercy Hospital School of Nursing in Denver, where she became class president.
After earning her diploma, she decided to get her bachelor’s degree in nursing. To pay the bills and gain experience while in Loretto Height College’s nursing program, she worked as a nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Denver, where she stayed for 10 years.
“I didn’t think I was going to be cut out for hospital nursing,” Zink said.
But it turned out she loved it – apart from pediatrics and hospice. She worked as a float nurse, bouncing wherever she was needed in the 500-bed St. Joseph’s Hospital in every department other than the inpatient psychiatric care and the operating room, she said.
With experience and an education under her belt, Zink knew she wanted to return to La Plata County.
“For my graduation from nursing school, my mother gave me a gift membership to the Colorado Nurses Association,” she said. “It was the same sort of parenting that she had used in the past. She said, ‘I’m buying you your membership, and from now on, it’s your responsibility to be a member of your professional organization.’”
In 1983, Zink was tapped to help establish the University of Colorado’s baccalaureate outreach program in Durango, which brought CU’s prerequisite nursing coursework to students attending Fort Lewis College.
“I needed to set up prerequisite coursework through Fort Lewis College, find a space for the classes and recruit the students,” she said.
After 21 students graduated from the program, CU brought a master’s program to Durango. Zink decided to get her master’s degree and become a certified women’s health nurse practitioner. She also became a certified childbirth educator through the American Society of Psychoprophylaxis and Obstetrics.
At that time, the former Community Hospital had a birthing center, Zink said, and she started teaching weekly birthing classes in Farmington and Durango.
“I had childbirth classes going pretty much constantly for 18 years,” she said. “About 2,000 women went through my birthing classes.”
Between 1985 and 1989, Zink worked as a nurse practitioner for OB/GYN physicians in Durango. In 1989, she founded the Southwest Women’s Health Associates alongside her business partner Debbie Jones and collaborating physician Dr. Lloyd Lifton.
“It was one of the first two nurse practitioner-owned and operated clinics to start in the United States,” she said.
Outside of that, she helped support the founding of Southwest Midwives; volunteered at the 9Health Fair – now known as 365 Health – drawing blood and managing the fair’s labs; and helped organize community vaccination clinics during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Zink did not want to stop working in health care. But her body had other plans.
In February, 2025, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Treatment prevented her from being able to commit as much time to her work, so she decided to retire at the age of 75.
But she is not done yet, she said.
“I feel called to civic engagement,” she said. “Well, I’ve been doing it for a lifetime. But I feel called to devote the rest of my career to that. And my career will be until I’m incapacitated or until I die.”
The three main things Zink and her husband focus on in the philanthropy space are education, children and open space conservation.
The Zinks own the Sunnyside Meats processing plant, which allows local farmers to process their livestock for sale in a USDA-certified plant right in La Plata County. Before Sunnyside, Zink said, that was not the case.
“We didn’t have a USDA-inspected packing plant in the community at the time,” she said.
Additionally, Zink has worked to preserve open space – particularly farmland – from development.
Most recently, she made a $1 million donation to FLC’s new nursing hall – a wing of which now bears her name – which is meant to give students hands-on learning experience in a state-of-the-art facility, right in rural Southwest Colorado.
She even turned her cancer diagnosis into a demonstration. After one chemo session, she contacted FLC’s director of nursing, Maggie La Rose, to see if she could give the nursing cohort a real-life lesson about cancer treatment and patient care. La Rose agreed, and Zink let students observe how to clean her chemo port.
At the end of the day, dedicating her life and career to giving back to her community was made easy by the people who live in it. The outpouring of support has made dealing with cancer that much easier.
“It’s the love and support of hundreds of people in the community that made my experience much easier for me than it otherwise would have been,” Zink said.
sedmondson@durangoherald.com
