Chanel Bea—2016 Fascinating Person #10

A passionate community advocate with a perpetual raised eyebrow, Chanel is one of our very favorite Fascinating People.

February 19, 2016; 3:01 PM • by Susan Howson

Meet each of the Fascinating People we’ve invited to speak for eight minutes on whatever they want. It goes down on Wednesday, February 24th. Learn more here but know that, sadly, we are SOLD OUT! Stay tuned to Twitter, though, because we will surely be enthusing all over the place about the pearls of wisdom they’ll all be casting.

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Chanel can go from quiet, behind-the-scenes, constant advocate to wall-destroyer and changemaker. We sat down with her for juts a few minutes earlier this week and learned approximately four important things–this time it was about public housing (Chanel lives in Creighton with her three kids). Sometimes it’s about how best to handle community engagement. Sometimes it’s about other things. All of the time it is measured, informative, and highly eye-opening.

She works for VCU’s “Engaging Richmond Team,” which is not an easy job. And the list of organizations she’s helped out is so long as to be exhausting. We enjoy talking to her about Richmond Promise Neighborhood and really just about any thing. She is SUPER good at giving you straight, no-BS answers about sensitive topics in a way that doesn’t make you feel stupid.

If Chanel goes home and rolls her eyes at how clueless we all are about the struggles of our fellow Richmonders, we’d never know it. She patiently explains things to us, because her mission is to make Richmond a better place for all.

Now that she might roll her eyes at.

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Read all the stories that feature our 2016 Fascinating People!