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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.”

Jorge Fournier | Unfinished Business Reader Response

It was great to continue reading Anne-Marie Slaughter. I really enjoyed her first article in the Atlantic and see this text as a continuation of this article with more research. I previously did not believe what Slaughter proposes that parenting and caregiving should be as respected as another profession. She did not see this idea accepted when she decided to leave the U.S. State Department to return to her family. I loved how she went into this personal experience in the text. Now, after taking at least ¾ of this class, I really believe that women and men should both make it a priority to develop an equal and flexible schedule to care for their children. My mom was running her own business when I was growing up and I remember the long days in the shopping mall while my mom sold clothes in her store to people walking by—I hated it. I was so bored and growing up I kind of wanted that my mother stopped working so that she could focus on taking care of my sister, brother, and I. Eventually, the business closed and she resorted to taking care of us before starting to work with nonprofits when we were both in high school. Now, my little brother is 9 years old and I am beginning to push my dad to get more involved in my little brother’s school work, activities, and parent responsibilities. This will avoid the “halo dad syndrome” that Slaughter also explains in the text. Maybe I can even mention to my mom that she needs to “let it go.”

Farmer Jane Reader Response | Jorge Fournier

The text, Farmer Jane, tells us the story about amazing women who are changing different industries like farming, through their business. In addition, it focuses on the way women are changing businesses for the future by making long-term relationships. In the text, it discusses women that are making a difference in their community. The story I liked most was about Jesse Ziff Cool. Her mission is on sustainable, local and organic food. She is also an author and a chef. Her mantra of “the customer comes last” made me read it again since, in the business school, we are often taught that the customer comes first. I loved hearing about her because it made me want to do research online and check out her “cool” restaurant, Flea Street Cafe. They only serve fresh, in-season, organic and local ingredients. The website itself looks really well done and if I visit Menlo Park, I will be sure to visit one of her cafes.

Another aspect I liked about her story is that Jesse’s family had made everything from scratch. We need more of that. Now, everything is pre-made, or pre-packaged and we are losing the good old homemade recipes that made us love our grandmother so much. Cool now has three restaurants and seven cookbooks. I hope she continues to achieve the success she has had so far and hopefully I can meet her at some point.

Kailen Gore and Jorge Fournier’s Shortened Sentences | Class Exercise

Jorge Fournier | Reader Response 3/20

I get excited every time I get to meet a woman in banking. I am going into investment banking this summer and I am currently networking with different groups to see which companies I will be covering during my internship. In these calls, we talk about the culture, opportunities for personal growth, and daily job activities. Banking is a man dominated environment. But banks are trying to change this by hosting women leadership conferences focused on recruiting attendees. In the reading, we see that gender stereotypes “affect how we perceive both men and women’s abilities.” I find startling that women are judged this way in banking. I believe that because it is a male-dominated environment, men are significantly picky with the women they invite to their teams. These gender stereotypes are rooted in our brains and even as we try to eliminate them, we sometimes fail to acknowledge them. As I begin to meet people, especially women, I get excited to be working in a bank that is actively trying to improve their gender and diversity statistics in a world filled with people who do not think the same way. Following the details in the reading, I have still not seen these women face to face, but I imagine that the association between women and beauty exists in banking. This gender role that has been created and discussed in the reading will probably be present, because, even as the bank moves to hire more women, the people in charge of choosing the women to fill the open roles might choose the prettier women. With this in mind, I hope we can continue to improve the statistics of women in the workplace and gender stereotypes.

In addition to the reading on gender roles, I was also surprised to read in the NYT article that women in science also face some discrimination. My sister is considering research as a potential career, so I am glad that I can give her a heads-up about it before she starts her full-time career.

Rebeccah Byer | Community Leader Profile | Jorge Fournier

Rebeccah Byer is the founder of The Olio, a nonprofit organization on glass blowing in Winston-Salem.

Jorge Fournier | New York Times Profile | Claire Martin

Fatimah Hussein had to stop playing softball when she arrived in middle school due to the inability to play with a hijab. Years later, Hussein founded the Girls Initiative in Recreation and Leisurely Sports, a program that provides girls-only gym time at the neighborhood center, upon learning that other girls felt the same way.

Access the link here.

WFU Student Leader Profile

The person I am going to interview: Cazandra Rebollar

Cazandra Rebollar, a first-generation Latina college student, is an award-winning campus leader who advocates on behalf of marginalized people, through organizations on and off campus.