One day, she found herself racing to the scene of a trailer fire where three small children had lost their lives. Barnes wrote of spotting \u201cburned children\u2019s clothes, a melted orange plastic wagon and a doll covered with soot and ice\u201d at the scene.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until that night\u2014after she\u2019d filed her story\u2014that Barnes allowed herself to process what she\u2019d seen.<\/p>\n \u201cThe realization that I came to was that I didn\u2019t want to be the person who was asking the grandmother questions [after a tragedy],\u201d she says. \u201cI wanted to be the person who was trying to help.\u201d<\/p>\n Barnes isn\u2019t bashful to admit she later got fired from that job. \u201cAt the time, I was super upset about it,\u201d she says. \u201cI look back on it now [and see] that getting fired from journalism \u2026 really forced me to take a look at what I\u2019m good at and what I\u2019m not good at.\u201d<\/p>\n Barnes, who majored in English at Hollins and earned a master\u2019s degree in journalism and public affairs from American University, went on to work in advertising and marketing, a field in which she excelled. \u201cWorked my way through several agencies as a copywriter and won big awards,\u201d Barnes explains.<\/p>\n Barnes noticed that on the job she was forever asking \u201cwhy?\u201d She wanted to know how things worked and how they could work better. She realized she liked looking at numbers and studying data.<\/p>\n She decided to become a strategic planner. \u201cListen man, I\u2019m nothing if not a master of reinvention of my career,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Barnes worked her way up to a job as vice president of insight at a Tennessee advertising agency that served clients in environmental sustainability businesses. \u201cIt was the first time my values aligned with my work,\u201d Barnes says.<\/p>\n Eventually, the traveling that job required wore her down. She briefly launched her own marketing and strategy consulting firm and became a founding partner in an artificial intelligence start-up business. While she believes the company has great potential, she decided at the end of 2016 that \u201cat some point, a girl needs to get paid.\u201d<\/p>\n Barnes was just starting to toy with the idea of getting a regular 9-to-5 \u201cjob-job\u201d when she came across an employment listing looking for someone to fill the top post at a new nonprofit organization designed to spur the economy. The first sentence of the ad hit Barnes so hard, she memorized it: \u201cWe believe in using innovation to improve the human condition.\u201d<\/p>\n Barnes threw her hat into the ring and started as the executive director for the Winston-Salem Venture Caf\u00e9 the following month. Winston-Salem follows Miami, Florida; St. Louis, Missouri; and Rotterdam, Netherlands, in opening Venture Caf\u00e9 locations since the first one launched in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2009.<\/p>\n \u201cOur mission is connecting innovators and entrepreneurs to make things happen,\u201d Barnes says of Venture Caf\u00e9. \u201cWhat I\u2019m excited about is the creative collisions that happen when you get people together eyeball to eyeball.\u201d<\/p>\n Barnes, who lives in Winston-Salem with her wife and golden retriever, thinks she\u2019ll stay in this post for a while. \u201cI feel like everything I\u2019ve done up to this point in my career has led me here,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m looking at this as my legacy work.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2014Beth JoJack \u201998<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Meet Olivia Body \u201908, a self-described word nerd\u2014and class letters editor.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Olivia Body \u201908 hears it all as the editor of class letters for Hollins<\/em> magazine, a job she\u2019s held for the last eight years. \u201cI\u2019ve had some lovely conversations with alumnae,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m getting to know women starting in classes in the 1940s all the way to new graduates.\u201d<\/p>\n Three times a year, Body edits and lays out the news she receives from class reporters. She also serves as reporter for classes who don\u2019t have someone in that post. The attention to detail the job requires would give many of us a migraine, but Body enjoys hunting down errant commas. \u201cI really love copy editing,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m a word nerd.\u201d<\/p>\n That was apparent to Body\u2019s English professor at Virginia Western Community College, who told the then 24-year-old that with her writing skills, she should consider applying to Hollins. Around the same time, Body met a woman who had attended Hollins as a Horizon student, the program for women of a nontraditional age returning to school.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m a big believer in the stars aligning and fate pushing you in a certain direction,\u201d Body says. \u201cI thought, \u2018This must be a sign that I need to look into this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n She did. Body thrived at Hollins, double majoring in English and studio art, all while raising a toddler and volunteering for four years as an English tutor to a Somali family.<\/p>\n After graduation, Body launched a photography business in Roanoke. In 2010, she returned to Hollins to work as multimedia coordinator in the marketing and public relations office, where she\u2019d once worked as a student assistant.<\/p>\n In 2013, Body moved with her husband and three sons to Charleston, South Carolina, after her husband\u2019s company transferred him there. She continued editing class letters in a freelance role.<\/p>\n A promotion for Body\u2019s husband brought the family back to Roanoke in 2014. Body began working as an English-as-a-second-language instructor to college students. She quickly discovered she loved the work, which allows her to get to know students from other cultures and bask in her love of language. \u201cI can get real technical with grammar,\u201d she says with enthusiasm.<\/p>\n Body recently started working toward earning her master\u2019s degree in curriculum and instruction online from Concordia University with the goal of eventually opening an accredited language institute or teaching college-level ESL in the Middle East.<\/p>\n While she\u2019s busy juggling graduate school, her career, and family, Body plans to continue editing class letters. \u201cI love working with the alumnae and learning about their life stories, connecting with them,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u2014Beth JoJack \u201998<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Master of reinvention In her line of work, Karen Barnes \u201990 enjoys \u201ccreative collisions.\u201d Early in her career, Karen Barnes worked as a reporter, covering a nearby, sprawling county for The Roanoke Times. One day, she found herself racing to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7909,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[72],"class_list":["post-7908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-web_only","tag-spring-2018"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7908"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7913,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7908\/revisions\/7913"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Photo](\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/karen-barnes.jpg\")
Early in her career, Karen Barnes worked as a reporter, covering a nearby, sprawling county for The Roanoke Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n![\"divider\"](\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/wave.png\")
<\/p>\nLearning About Life Stories<\/h3>\n
![\"Photo](\"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/olivia-body.jpg\")
First jobs. Weddings. Cross-country moves. Babies. Promotions. Moves to retirement communities.<\/p>\n