WEST VIRGINIA WONDER WOMEN THE G.O.A.T. LYNN BENEDICT, LEWISBURG Member of the Advance Judges Committee and the Board of Directors of the American Dairy Goat Association FARMING DREAMS “I grew up in Pennsylvania and always wanted to be a farmer. I came to West Virginia in 1972 and fell in love with it. I love the land, and I love the people. People ask me why, and maybe it’s stubbornness, but I think it’s an amazing place.” LEARNING CURVE “Goats can be a real pain, but they generally like people and are very friendly.There was a lot of trial and error in building our facility. I had to learn to feed and take care of them and keep them healthy.There was a learning curve with health, because I didn’t have a mentor to help me—there were only five members of the American Dairy Goat Association when I first started raising goats—and there is some lack in vet knowledge when it comes to them. You’ve got to make sure you have good sense, or you shouldn’t get goats.” WOMEN HELPINGWOMEN “I am joining the Board of Directors for West Virginia Healing Home, a facility that supports expecting mothers in their journey through addiction, helping them get and stay clean. We offer them support in all forms: clothes, job interviews, babysitting, classes. It won’t be easy, but it’s really important work. These women aren’t throwaways—they just need help.”DL THE NEWSPAPERWOMAN MISSY NESTER, WELCH Publisher of the The Welch News and The (Pineville) Independent Herald IN THE BEGINNING My parents—Leonard and Edith Nester—used the newspaper as a learning tool. It was a rite of passage in our family to be able to go outside the gate to the box and bring back the newspaper to my parents and grandparents.Then, they would sit down and read the paper with us, teaching us how important it was to stay informed. I continued with my high school newspaper, where our journalism teacher— James ‘Duffy’ Angove, taught us the impact we could make with our stories.”
THE MISSION “It’s such a passion project of mine, working with small-town newspapers. I knew when I bought The Welch News that this business wasn’t about making a lot of money—it was about giving this underserved community its own voice. I have a deep-seated love for this newspaper and how the community and the newspaper interact with each other.” THE IMPACT “By doing this, we’re creating jobs in our community and preserving access for thousands of residents to their local news. In Welch, we have six of us working in the office, and we run our own printing press—it’s a 1966 model.Then we’ve got about 12 drivers we put on the road who hit every hollow and every ridge three times each week. We are all about saving local journalism, we are all about home delivery to our very many elderly residents, and amazing relationships between our drivers and our residents develop. We have customers who will buy groceries on paper days and wait for the driver to get there to carry them in for them. In the winter, they deliver bread and milk with the paper.” AB THE SPORTS BOSS KELI ZINN, MORGANTOWN Chief operating officer/deputy athletics director for West Virginia University Athletics ON BEING AWOMAN IN A MAN’S WORLD “I was the first female to lead the WVU Athletics Department in the interim— appointed by President Gorden Gee—while a new director was found. I’m the deputy director now, serving as the chief operating officer. It’s empowering, fast-paced, and results-driven, but I say that in the most positive way. I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by a lot of men who have given me a lot of opportunity to thrive in that space.” WOMEN IN SPORTS “Athletics creates significant opportunities and many options for women. It’s an environment where you learn valuable lessons—working well with others, the pursuit of excellence, pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone, and giving it all for the win—that wire you in a way that threads throughout your personal and professional life.” #GOALS “I hope it holds that I’ll be an athletic director at a Power 5 school in the
near future. I try not to get too caught up in that being the ultimate goal and lose sight of how fortunate I am right now in my career, but I continue to work for that. I’m going to continue to work for that. I have a lot of people around and above me who are hopeful that that happens for me, too, so I’m optimistic.” HLT
THE ADVOCATE FOR CHILDREN KELLI CASEMAN, SOUTH CHARLESTON Executive director and founding member of Think Kids
CLOSING THE GAP “I was born and raised in West Virginia, spending most of my childhood in Tyler County. After some time in North Carolina, I moved back to Charleston in 2004.The more I worked in West Virginia, the more I realized the gap in programs and services for children. Think Kids is my response to that, focused on finding ways to close that gap.” THE FUTURE “The smartest thing we can do as a state is invest in our kids. When Think Kids works on effective strategies to do this, we look at quantitative and qualitative data—at what’s happening in communities, which are a lot of good things.These communities really find ways to benefit their kids. We want to help and work with them. Together, we can nurture generations of compassionate, critical thinkers who can lead West Virginia in new directions. ” COMMUNITY FOCUS “We’re eager to grow. We want to reach out and speak with more people about the challenges they’re facing in their communities to learn more about how we can help them. We’re interested in a more equitable response, giving people more of a stake in what’s happening to and around them. Too many outside groups come into West Virginia, make observations about how we should change, then leave without helping make the change happen. It’s cultivated a lot of distrust. We think the answers to West Virginia’s problems are already here. It’s time for us to invest in them.” DL
96 wvliving.com • fall 2021
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