Integrity and Excellence with Angela Kennecke

Angela Kennecke was inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame in 2021 for her distinguished career in journalism and her commitment to using truth, integrity, and compassion to serve others. An award-winning journalist and longtime broadcaster, Angela spent decades holding institutions accountable and telling stories that mattered. Her legacy expanded beyond the newsroom through nonprofit leadership and advocacy focused on substance use disorder prevention, education, and recovery.

An Early Calling

Angela’s calling to journalism began early. Encouraged by her mother, a writer and teacher, she was immersed in storytelling from childhood. “When I was five years old, I had a tape recorder and I was interviewing people,” she recalled. By age 12, after watching a Barbara Walters interview, her path was clear. “I didn’t want to be the person being interviewed. I wanted to do the interviewing.”

She pursued journalism academically, earning a master’s degree in communications management, and structured her education and early career entirely around that goal. “Everything I did was geared toward journalism,” she said, noting that she never wavered from that.

After college, Angela stepped into a demanding newsroom environment where she often felt pressure to prove herself. “I felt like every day I had to prove that I was capable and smart and could do the job,” she shared. Over time, mentorship from experienced journalists helped refine her writing and strengthen her confidence, shaping her foundation for a dedicated career.

Turning Grief Into Action

Over more than three decades in broadcast journalism, Angela covered everything from city council meetings to major investigative stories. The most life-altering moment of her career came after the death of her daughter, Emily, from fentanyl poisoning in 2018. Angela made the difficult decision to share her family’s story publicly. “I knew that I had to tell her story,” she said. “If it impacted just one life, if it saved just one life, I owed it to her to talk about it.”

That decision became the catalyst for founding Emily’s Hope, a nonprofit organization dedicated to substance use disorder education, prevention, and recovery. Angela described the experience as something she “could never have predicted in a million years,” yet one that aligned with her lifelong skills as a journalist. “The listening skills, the writing skills, the interviewing skills, all of those things really transferred over into working in the nonprofit world.”

Through Emily’s Hope, treatment scholarships, naloxone distribution, and prevention education have reached communities across South Dakota and beyond. Angela emphasizes the ripple effect of this work. “We know that Emily’s Hope has helped get people into treatment,” she said. “You think of the ripple effect of that chance they have for recovery and how that impacts so many other people.”

Integrity In All Things

Integrity has been a constant throughout Angela’s life and career. “Integrity is probably one of my biggest values,” she shared. “It’s what you do when no one is watching, and it’s always trying to do the right thing.” That principle guided her investigative reporting and continues to shape her nonprofit leadership today.

Angela also speaks candidly about resilience and choice in the face of hardship. She often describes life’s challenges as falling into a pit. “Some people splatter on the bottom of that pit, and some people bounce back up,” she said. “I always say, I want to be a bouncer. I want to be able to bounce out of that pit of despair and do something with it.”

Her perspective on substance use disorder has evolved through lived experience. “I have so much more compassion, so much less judgment than I ever did,” she reflected. She advocates for treatment over punishment and for communities to support families openly rather than pushing them into silence and shame.

A Lasting Impact

Angela’s impact continues through Emily’s Hope, its prevention curriculum used in schools across multiple states, and her podcast, Grieving Out Loud. The podcast allows for deeper conversations than traditional broadcast formats. “I love to talk to people, and I love to tell stories,” she said. “We hear from mothers and dads every week who say, ‘Thank you for doing this podcast. It helped me know I’m not alone.’”

When asked about legacy, Angela remains focused on impact rather than recognition. “It doesn’t matter whether people know me or not,” she said. “What matters is that the work changed people and changed people’s lives for their kids and their grandchildren and so on.”

Watch the full interview with Angela Kennecke, founder and CEO of Emily’s Hope, hosted by Shawn Martin, Manager of the South Dakota Hall of Fame Visitor & Education Center, below to hear the stories in her own words.