After-hours, in the otherwise silent Benjamin F. Edwards & Co. financial services offices, laughter spills out of a small conference room. Inside, arranged around the circular table, are five women, all smartly dressed and looking like they’d just come from the beauty salon, the board room or both. In fact, some had just come from their high-powered day jobs, while the others had come from an afternoon of errands, the kind of list that comes with the free time of retirement coupled with the to-do’s of a heavily involved citizen. Each of the women carries a reputation within the community. There’s:
Julie Baumgardner, left, and Lynda Hood are part of the steering committee helping to keep the event alive – and local., executive director of the Chattanooga Bar Association. If you haven’t met her at a charity function – many of which she’s helped chair – you aren’t plugged into that side of the city.
Julie Baumgardner, CEO of family focused nonprofit First Things First, and 2017 Chattanooga Area Manager of the Year, and chair of the National Association of Relationship and Marriage Education, and Scenic City Women’s Network’s 2017 Lydia Award winner, and Her list of accolades could fill a CV.
Barbie Standefer, a community volunteer and fundraiser for over 45 years, has worked with the Symphony and Opera Guild, Siskin Foundation Auxiliary, the American Lung Association, Friends of Special Children, the Performing Arts League, and Signal Centers. She proudly helped establish the Buz Standefer Lung Center at CHI Memorial in memory of her husband.
Rickie Pierce is a Tennessee Woman of Distinction, a former Associate Head at GPS, a board member and chair of the board academic committees of Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy and Hiwassee College. Currently she is chair of the Red Cross board and serves on committees of several organizations of which she has been president, such as the Chattanooga Women’s Leadership Institute and the Kiwanis Club of Chattanooga.