She had chosen Revolutionary Pageants and Crowns For Change for her daughter, looking for leadership skills and confidence in a young advocate's voice. Then she went to the meetings. All of them. "In attending all the meetings and events with her, I realized that I belonged in that community," she says — and that realization came with a condition attached. A seat on the Crowns For Change board was ahead of her, and she did not want it handed over. "If I was going to be part of it, and also have a position on the Board of Crowns For Change, then I felt I should earn my place by competing and leading not only as an advocate but as a titleholder."
The title she applied for, rather than won on a Saturday night: an appointed national placement with Revolutionary, so that she could go on to compete for an international title alongside her daughter, Miss Teen Revolutionary Americas. "I was thrilled and honored that Revolutionary found a place for me as a national titleholder," she says. While the international competition waits, she has spent the year building the platform by building bridges — more than 400 service hours so far, logged at meetings, community events, fundraisers, and online video conferences. She is also a member of the Junior League of Nashville, a service organization that keeps her in the rooms where the communities she advocates for actually are.
The platform did not arrive with her. She created Bare Arms contemporaneously with the appointment, and she was deliberate about where she built it. "Revolutionary is a system that can handle and support me talking about controversial issues such as vaccines and gun control," she says — a system that "doesn't shy away from controversy or inclusion." Crowns For Change, by her account, exists for exactly that reason: "to open the industry to more people who are perfectly themselves," and to do work that is authentic, vulnerable and challenging. Knowing the ground would hold, she used her background in public health policy to build the platform out with the system behind her.
Bare Arms is built on two numbers she can recite without notes. Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children and teens in the United States. Vaccination rates are falling, and illnesses that were effectively gone are not gone anymore. Bare Arms exists to move both. In practice that means many hours a week of unglamorous connective work: putting confused and concerned parents in front of actual vaccine facts and science, and partnering with TN Moms Demand Action and the Be SMART program to reduce firearm deaths among children.
The work overlaps, deliberately, with mental health advocacy — suicide prevention with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, access and stigma with the National Alliance on Mental Illness. "Both overlap with preventing death by firearm," she notes, and the overlap is the point. She is also operations officer of Color and Cause, a nonprofit her daughter founded that uses art to create healing in communities, which puts her in local shelters and mental health organizations on a regular basis.
Away from all of it, there is one shoreline. "My spiritual home is on the shore of Lake Superior where my mind, body and spirit always feel free and integrated," she says. Closer to home, the priority list is short and unchanging — kids, partner, her dad, the dogs — "always the source of love, joy, support, and several walks a day."
From the crown
Do what you love because it is what you love; not because you think it looks good as a platform or would impress the judges or anyone else. Authenticity is the most glamorous crown a titleholder can wear.
