Kiwanis will honor its 2006 Citizen of the Year at a gala banquet this Sunday.

All Wini Jones is trying to do is make Bainbridge a better place. So she was surprised when she learned the Bainbridge Island Kiwanis Club named her its 2006 Citizen of the Year.

“It’s absolutely wonderful,” Jones said. “I am most appreciative and thankful.”

Said Kiwanis member Liz Murray, “Wini’s wide array of contributions to this island was so extensive that it was almost unanimous.”

The public is invited to join Kiwanis in “recognizing and/or honoring the years of contributions” made by Jones, Tom Paski and George Neshiem at a Sept. 24 dinner at IslandWood. Paski and Neshiem’s names will be added to the obelisk in Battle Point Park, alongside other islanders who have made major contributions to Bainbrige over the years.

Jones has lived on Bainbridge for 28 years. She was a Seattle commuter until 1996, when she retired after 18 years in the ski wear business. Jones was vice president in charge of design and marketing for the Rolfe company, which manufactured ski wear and sports wear.

“I had one job and it lasted 30 years,” said Jones, enjoyed all aspects of her career, from the far-flung traveling to designing fabric.

Freed from her corporate challenges, Jones surveyed Bainbridge and began getting involved with “local things.”

“I have come to realize since then that approximately 400 Bainbridge Islanders commute every day and don’t know that much about what’s going on on the island,” she said. “We need to know and we need to get involved.”

Jones walks the walk, having become “emotionally invested” in the activities and events on the island.

One of the first things she got involved in was Bainbridge Island Television, noting the importance of having noncommercial public access TV on the island. The phone was in her home office.

“We eventually got a channel in ‘Channel Siberia,’ channel 98,” said Jones, a past board president. “At the time, in 1996-97, the City Council did not want to be televised. I think they have since come around.”

Three years later, Jones joined forces with the Economic Council and ultimately became its board president. She championed lifting the island from its “digital backwater” mire.

“At the time there were very few places where you got Internet access,” Jones said. “I organized an extensive telephone survey of the whole island.”

She got the 400 responses in front of everyone she could – from Qwest to Comcast – and the island got with the technological times.

Jones has a keen eye for zeroing in on an issue that needs improving and finding solutions. The top three issues that push her buttons – and must happen now, she said – involve community radio, housing for city employees and the Washington State Ferries maintenance yard.

Jones is pursuing licensing for a non-commercial, public access radio for the island. She is convinced the ferry yard “has outlived its purpose” and needs to be relocated, and is working with a citizen group toward that end.

Jones next turned her attention to the plight of housing for civic employees and last spring conducted one of her famous surveys. She learned that of the 580 people it takes to “make the island run,” 40 percent don’t live here because they can’t afford housing. Jones has a remedy for this.

“I own the southwest corner of New Brooklyn and Sportsman Club, eight acres,” she said. “It’s the perfect place to do that (build housing). My vision is to lease the land to a nonprofit…this would be rental housing in perpetuity. (The renters) could save money and go into a house.

“We have to take care of the people who run our city.”

The Calgary native honed her entrepreneurial and problem-solving skills at a tender age. When she was 12, she swung buckets on her bike handles, scooped minnows from a creek, salted and bagged them and sold them as bait to a sporting goods store.

To pay part of the cost of attending the University of Montana, she worked as a lifeguard and sold postcards she bought from her father’s printing company to tourist outlets. During her freshman year, she earned her Canadian certification to teach skiing. She knew she had to learn about textiles in order to design ski clothes – her dream since age 16.

“French was the language of design, German the language of the ski industry,” Jones said.

So she earned degrees in the former and in textile science and devised a wonderful solution for learning German: she put together her portfolio, asked a German-speaking friend to translate her letters and got accepted into a design school in Vienna.

After winning so many competitions the first year, she was told not to return the following four.

That summer, Jones traveled to Switzerland, where she taught swimming and learned French from a young man she dated. In the winter, she became the first non-Swiss to teach skiiing. Her adventures continued on the ship back to the United States, where she ultimately settled in Seattle.

Jones takes great joy in immersing herself in many arenas. She serves as board member of Bainbridge Performing Arts and as an advisory board member of the Kids Discovery Museum.

With a zest for life, Jones does not believe in dull moments. She and a group of fellow islanders “all over the age of doing this without risk” join the Peak-to-Valley race every February at Whistler.

“It is one great, fun time,” she said.

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Thanks, Wini

The Kiwanis banquet honoring Wini Jones, the 2006 Citizen of the Year, will begin with a social hour at 5 p.m. Sept. 24 at IslandWood. Dinner will follow at 6 p.m. For reservations call Kris at 842-5882 or Liz at 842-1443.