HerStory Podcast - Presented by Chamber Fayetteville and Be Freaking Awesome - Featuring Stories of Women of Fayetteville

From the very first episode, they have been here. Asking the questions, holding space, staying curious and just barely managing not to ask too many follow-ups during the rapid fire questions. Now it is their turn. In the finale episode of HerStory, Sami Kinnison and Angela Belford interview each other. No outside guest. No filter. Just the two hosts, who also happen to be mother and daughter, fina...

About two or three weeks after Shannon Hendrix left her corporate healthcare leadership career, her husband looked at her and said: I'm glad I got my Shannon back. She did not fully realize, until that moment, just how much of herself she had been spending. She took eight months off. She played tennis every day. She had lunch dates and coffee with people she had not made time for in years. She wat...

Tamara Phillips walked into a bank every week for six to eight weeks. She was not a customer. She was just a woman who knew she wanted to work in banking and decided to show up until someone gave her the chance. Finally, a hiring manager called her and said: I am just tired of you coming in here asking if we have openings. I have a job for you. That job was in the basement. She sat in front of a m...

Olivia James started her career thinking she wanted to be in public health. Then she did an internship at a community clinic, got introduced to the behavioral health department, and started paying closer attention to something she had been circling for a while. Then a tornado changed everything. She was injured. She experienced physical mobility limitations. She went to counseling to process the t...

Ashley Harris arrived in Washington D.C. at 21 years old with a PR degree and no room for fear. She was scheduling and managing the office of a congressman, surrounded by people who had been doing this for decades, and she just decided her words carried weight. That conviction has followed her across every room she has walked into since. Now she is the VP of Marketing and Communications at Ozarks...

Six years into a successful law career, Meredith Lowry looked up and realized she had no friends. The law school crew had scattered. Life had accelerated. And the woman who would go on to found a networking initiative for women entrepreneurs was sitting at networking events not knowing how to talk to anyone. Meredith is a patent attorney with Wright Lindsey Jennings, one of a very small number of...

Mallory Files started Ozark Charcuterie in her home kitchen five years ago because she needed somewhere to put her hands and her energy. She had no business plan for what it would become. She just started making boards. Today, Mallory is the founder and owner of Ozark Charcuterie and Wine Bar, a pink-painted, disco-ball-adorned space in downtown Fayetteville that she describes as the antithesis of...

Before Chung Tan started working in Fayetteville, the city didn't know how many businesses were operating inside its own limits. No registry. No emergency contacts. No way to answer the basic question: who is actually here? Chung Tan is the Director of Industry and Employment Services for the City of Fayetteville, a Certified Economic Developer, and one of North America's Top 50 Economic Developer...

Lauren Allen will tell you, completely deadpan, that love is what brought her to Fayetteville. Her boyfriend was here. So she followed him. They're getting married now, so it worked out. But that one-liner is just the entry point into a conversation about what it really means to show up for a community, and for the kids most likely to be forgotten by it. Lauren is the Community and Volunteer Engag...

Tanya Mimms graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1993, looked around at Northwest Arkansas, and decided she wasn't leaving. Back then, most people had to. There weren't a lot of jobs. The first people willing to take a chance on her were a car dealership. She got a job. She stayed in finance. And she never looked back. Now she's the Fayetteville Community President at First National Bank o...

Natalie Abram grew up in Fayetteville, cheered at the University of Arkansas, planned weddings, worked events at Crystal Bridges and The Momentary, and is now the events and marketing manager at Lewis Automotive Group. She is 24 years old. She did not finish college. And she is one of the most clear-eyed people in this series about what it takes to get where she is. She doesn't see a glass ceiling...

Takama Statton-Brooks spent 22 years in higher education. She loved it. She was good at it. She had a career that by almost any measure was working. And then her father passed away, and she remembered a promise she had made to herself that she hadn't kept. She had told herself she wanted to get her social work license again. She had never done it. There was no reason not to, except that she was co...

Beth Pittman's dad gave her advice early in her career that she's spent the last two decades respectfully disagreeing with. He told her to keep her head down, work hard, and the company would take care of her. What actually happened was that a client she used to support in a legal capacity looked up one day and said, I think you'd make a really good recruiter. She didn't even know what that meant....

Julie Magnuson didn't plan to end up in Northwest Arkansas. She just kept saying yes to the next right thing. Buying from promotional product vendors. Working for one. Moving to a new market for a colleague who needed help. And then one day, someone asked what it would take for her to stay, and she looked around and thought: this is a good place to raise a family. Forty years later, she and her da...

Sixteen years into running her own firm, Brittany Phillips still gives young designers the same piece of advice: go find someone you admire and go learn. Not because she's repeating what worked. Because she lived it, and it's still the truest thing she knows. Brittany is the founder of Brittany Phillips Design, a brand design firm in Fayetteville built intentionally small. She came up through regi...

She moved to Fayetteville in 2020 for school, got COVID, mono, and tonsillitis three times, and genuinely did not think she was going to stay. Fast forward a few years: she's the publisher of Fayetteville City Lifestyle Magazine, a published author, and one of the people most responsible for making sure this city's stories actually get told. Sydney Sullivan did not plan any of this. And that's exa...

There are stories happening all around you. In the coffee shop, in the board room, in the carpool line. Women who built something, survived something, started something, lost something and kept going anyway. Most of those stories never make it past a quick handshake and a business card exchange. That changes now. HerStory is a limited podcast series from Chamber Fayetteville and Be Freaking Awesom...