For our annual ladies' issue, we're highlighting the women in our community who are spearheading positive change. Whether through business savvy, creative inspiration or community influence, here are a few upstanding women who are making a positive impact.
1. Dixie Daly
Living your purpose with passion. For Loveland’s Dixie Daly, this is a daily focus and something she works to instill within everyone she encounters. Fueled with love for the Sweetheart City and passion for connecting and elevating those around her, she inspires, mentors, and encourages entrepreneurs and business owners to reach their goals and pursue their dreams. Calling Loveland home for over 40 years, she invests in local community and is known for being the woman in pink. This has become her calling card and she has built several very successful businesses that incorporate her love for pink, family, self-growth, and community. She is currently Loveland’s Business/Membership Director for the Chamber of Commerce and has over 35 years of networking experience and business education for entrepreneurs. Aside from her role as a pillar within the local community, some of her other businesses include Tickled Pink products, three greeting card lines that share her love and talent for poetry, and four books launched on Amazon. Her latest is a journal titled “A Conversation with My Soul” can also be found at Loveland’s Barnes & Noble.
Whether she’s sharing her wisdom, creating products to help others grow, or supporting her local community, it's clear she lives her purpose with passion with a flair all her own, and a touch of pink!
2. Alisha Lee Jeffers at Big Picture Creative Co
For Loveland artist and owner of Big Picture Creative Co., Alisha Lee Jeffers, the process of making art is life-giving. And engaging her unique perspectives in the business world has taken her life to a whole new level.
Described as life coaching for rebel minds and unconventional thinkers, Big Picture Creative Co. empowers creatives at any level to unlock their full potential. Alisha became a Certified Professional Life Coach because she wanted to help others connect with their “why” in life. Her methods include illustrated vision maps, coaching conversations, and workshops that put clients in contact with arts & crafts in a therapeutic way.
An unconventional thinker herself, she’s developed a framework to visually navigate life’s challenges. She uses this creative tool along with artful play to help unlock personal wisdom, insight, and confidence in a visual and non-intimidating way. She finds that it’s empowering for people to know that everyone has their own process, particularly creatives, and that they’re all valid. It’s through these processes that she connects people back to their inner playfulness and creativity.
“My favorite part of what I do is the authentic connections I make. When I can inspire someone, show them that they are seen and valued, I feel their energy lift. They see that another way to succeed is possible. That gives me the biggest heart-smile.”
3. Katie Johnson at Be the Gift
As the Development and Events Director at Be The Gift, a nonprofit that serves Northern Colorado single moms and their children through home repair assistance, Katie Johnson has seen transformations that are truly making a difference. Since 2008, their team of project managers and volunteers have worked together to provide safer, healthier, and more functioning homes so that single moms can focus on the task at hand—raising their children.
With the organization since its onset, Katie explains, “My favorite part is getting to know the women that we help, hear their stories, and then getting to see their home transformation. It’s like a weight has been lifted off their shoulders. You get to see the security that comes from that and it's life-changing."
She goes on to explain, "These ladies are such heroes and being able to help these moms and their kids is so rewarding."
4. Dr. Sonny Miles at Healing with Intention Integrative Medicine
Healing is deep yet intensely rewarding work and nobody knows this better than Dr. Sonny Miles, Loveland integrative medicine physician and founder of Healing with Intention Integrative Medicine. Always fascinated by health, the body, and healing, Dr. Miles’ work has run the gamut. With training in conventional medicine as well as experience with reiki, acupuncture, shamanic practice, and other healing modalities, meeting her patients with expertise and empathy and transforming their health - body, mind, and spirit - has become her life’s work.
Dr. Miles has traveled a winding path of healing modalities from conventional to alternative and has learned that everybody’s path to healing is unique. It was through her internal medicine residency that she quickly realized that patching people up in a revolving door environment wasn’t her calling and was where her interest in holistic medicine began. She was especially impacted by her time in palliative care. It’s from this experience that she began to recognize that going through the medical system frequently isn’t a healing experience, rather a triggering one.
Through these experiences, she created a practice that recognizes everyone’s unique perspectives, traumas, and bodies, and by exploring each of these, she is able to offer a unique path to healing. She explains, “I believe that the journey to health is personal, transformative, and often internal and I feel honored to accompany patients on their own unique journey to wholeness and healing.”
5.) Dylan Demery and Emily Anderson at She's Fly®
Created out of the pronounced gap in offerings for women in the fly fishing industry, Dylan Demery and Emily Anderson, co-founders of She's Fly® in Northern Colorado, knew that they could do better for women. And they have. In an industry dominated by men, they strive to provide ergonomically correct fishing gear that suits women’s bodies as well as create safe, fun, and non-intimidating environments to teach women how to fly fish.
“We want to show women that you can be here too,” explains Dylan.
After using fly fishing as a way to work through grief in her own life, Dylan knows the healing capabilities of fly fishing firsthand. Emily has also experienced the cathartic nature of the sport and explains, “There are so many benefits of being outside, particularly when you’re fly fishing. It forces you to be exactly where your feet are.”
Emily and Dylan believe that everyone deserves to feel comfortable in the outdoors and through She's Fly® they’re here to help you get there.
She lives her purpose with passion and a touch a pink!
“When I can inspire someone, show them that they are seen and valued, I feel their energy lift.”
"These ladies are such heroes and being able to help these moms and their kids is so rewarding."
“My goal is to provide a healing experience that connects you to your own wisdom and guides and supports.”
