HerStory Podcast - Presented by Chamber Fayetteville and Be Freaking Awesome - Featuring Stories of Women of Fayetteville
Every woman you admire has a story she almost didn't tell. The version where things didn't go as planned. The pivot that looked like a failure before it became the thing that changed everything. The moment she almost talked herself out of the room she was born to be in. Those are the stories that actually teach us something. The ones that make you feel less alone and more ready to go back out there and try again. That's what HerStory is about, and it starts with an invitation. Chamber Fayetteville's Women of All Generations returns on Tuesday, June 16, 2026, from 3...
EP8 What's the Next Right Thing with Tanya Mimms
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 of NWA, a role created specifically for her, overseeing lending, retail, marketing, business development, HR, and as she puts it, sometimes cleaning and buying toilet paper. Because that's what...
EP7 Be Your Own Hype Woman with Natalie Abram
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. She doesn't talk about people blocking her path. She says: the only person standing between me and what's coming next is me. And she says it like...
EP6 Every Path Leads Back with Takama Statton-Brooks
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 content. And contentment, it turns out, is sometimes the thing standing between you and the work you were actually built for.<...
EP5 You Have to Look Up with Beth Pittman
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. She looked into it, interviewed, got the job, and found the thing she was built for.
Now, after 20-plus years in recruiting and...
EP4 The Mother-Daughter Business That Works with Julie and Cassidy Magnuson
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 daughter Cassidy are running Creative Promos together. And the goal Cassidy just said out loud for the first time? To take over the...
EP3 The Designer Who Designed Her Life with Brittany Phillips
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 regional ad agencies, global work with Saatchi and Saatchi X, and years at DOCSA under mentor Tim Walker before going out on her own. In this episode, she sits down with Angela...
EP2 Publishing, Purpose, and Putting Yourself in Rooms That Scare You with Sydney Sullivan
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 exactly what makes her story worth hearing.
In this episode of HerStory, Sami sits down with Sydney to talk about what it looks like to build a career around something you've...
EP1 Why We're Telling Her Story (And Why You Should Listen)
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 Awesome, hosted by Sami Kinnison and Angela Belford. Each episode features a different woman from the Fayetteville community, sharing the real version of her story. Not the polished version. The actual...
