Community Leader Profile – Rebeccah Byer | By Jorge Fournier
By Jorge Fournier
Just ten minutes from campus, students can now ignite their creative spirit at temperatures above 1,000°F. Inside a refurbished warehouse at the West End Mill Works in downtown Winston-Salem, adjacent heaters –called “glory holes” –reheat glass to soften and keep glass hot enough to allow visitors to experience the magic of glass blowing.
Since she was a teenager, Rebeccah Byer has cherished a dream of one day opening a glassblowing studio that would help the community. In September 2014, it became a reality. A former bartender, fundraiser, producer, entrepreneur, and cook, Byer started The Olio, a non-profit glassblowing studio and entrepreneurial school that combines her love of glass blowing and teaching.
“We are not just a glass studio,” Byer said. “We are an art studio and entrepreneurial studio. A studio for learning an arts-integrated approach to entrepreneurship.”
Byer first started glass blowing by accident. “I was really struggling in school and was about to quit college because I wasn’t enjoying myself,” Byer said. After failing to register in a pottery class, Byer took glass blowing and found her calling. “I realized it was something I wanted to do and to teach,” Byer said. The class eventually led her to start the first glassblowing studio in the Triad in September 2014.
To Byer, The Olio serves as a place where you can capture your artistic, entrepreneurial, or community spirit. “I love when people’s eyes light up when they blow glass for the first time,” Byer said.
An olio is a hodge-podge, medley, or a dish of many flavors. “At The Olio, you are going to have a different experience from somebody else,” Byer said. “Because people are different.”
The Olio has lots of fans. “We have people who bring us their bottles that they have accumulated at home. People who come shop, go for the pay-what-you-want stuff, and other people just come to take a class or a field trip,” Byer said. At The Olio, there is something for everybody to tap into in some way, whether you are a customer or a person interested in glass blowing.
Even though Byer has been quite successful in launching The Olio in the community, she frequently experiences challenges as a female entrepreneur.
Byer recently had someone come in and ask about classes at The Olio. “I showed him the list and the offerings of what he could do,” Byer said. After he made clear that his teachers at other studios had been men, he left when he realized Byer was going to be the instructor.
Byer’s glass-blowing interest, a common profession for men, has not stopped since she first started in 1993. “When I was 19, it never occurred to me that because it is male dominated, I can’t do it,” Byer said. “To me, I was going to be one of the few women to start.”
In another instance, she was once working in her studio, holding a power tool, when a guy on his lunch break passed by. She was in her usual work clothes; he was in a suit. “He just looks at me and says, ‘Do you need help with that?'”
Byer has never felt that she cannot blow glass because she is a woman. “When men walk by, or say something directly to me, I look at it as an opportunity, because I am never really that offended,” Byer said. “It’s just simply their own ignorance.”
Byer tends to look at what she cannot do as just simply things she has not learned yet. “She is very hard working and dedicated, with extremely high ideals and integrity,” said Mary Haglund, a local restaurant owner and Byer’s friend.
The Olio not only offers services to people who are willing to pay, but also has apprentices year-round who spend their afternoon’s glass blowing. The apprenticeship program is The Olio’s core program, open to people aged 14 to 24. With the aim of helping young kids in the community, The Olio manages to bring apprentices with a strong desire to learn and explore glass blowing.
Haglund admires Byer’s work with apprentices: “She has taken an art form with expensive materials and has made it accessible to people who would have never had training in glass blowing.”
Byer recognizes that not everyone is as interested in glass blowing as she, but she manages to accomplish much more than just teaching glass blowing to students. At The Olio, apprentices learn a variety of skills, ranging from bookkeeping to chemistry.
“We engage our apprentices and our students in a variety of ways,” Byer said. “It’s not just about art. It’s about professional development, life skills, teamwork, and communication.”
By empowering the next generation of glassblowers, Byer is tapping into people’s creativity and helping them build life-long skills.
Jan Detter, a Wake Forest professor of practice in Entrepreneurship, sees Byer as extremely determined to take on challenges –going where a lot of women have not gone before. “She didn’t establish a big school,” Detter said. “She started an individual studio with a mission of sharing her love of glassblowing to unlikely people for the rest of her life.”
Haglund agrees: “She makes this art form available, and art changes lives.”
Although an introvert, Byer said she has to constantly balance her love of helping and teaching with her own time for work and for selling and fundraising. With this in mind, she has started a blog on her website to further involve the community in The Olio’s endeavors so that it remains sustainable.
“She is the only woman in North Carolina that started a glass-blowing studio as a non-profit,” Detter said. By starting The Olio, Byer’s work has pursued directions which women are sometimes not encouraged to follow.
“I want to see us coining the term ‘social enterprise,'” Byer said. The business needs to make money in order to survive, and how The Olio invests its money is what’s important.
“We are investing the money into our people and the community,” Byer said. “Not in a CEO.”
Leave a Reply