The October Women’s Leadership Coffee Talk, Entrepreneurial Mindset, will take place Tuesday, Oct. 10, from 8 to 9 a.m. at the Jepson Alumni Executive Center’s Kalnen Inn Living Room at 1119 Hanover St. Register for the Coffee Talk.
Join us at October’s Coffee Talk as we delve into the empowering world of the Entrepreneurial Mindset. If you agree with the statement “Failure is Success in Progress” then you might have an entrepreneurial mindset! Explore the common traits of entrepreneurs and how you can cultivate continued opportunities that will set you up for business success. October’s Coffee Talk will be led by April Peterson, Co-Owner and General Manager of River Rock Outfitter, a specialty outdoor store in Downtown Fredericksburg.
She fell in love with Fredericksburg when her husband was first stationed here with the Marine Corps in 2001. April earned a Masters of Art degree in Public History and worked in various historical societies and museums around the country – from Florida to Washington State. In 2008, they moved back to Virginia and April started working for the Marine Corps’ Wounded Warrior Regiment specializing in strategic communications, legislative affairs, and program management. She considers working with wounded warriors and their families to be the most rewarding experience of her career.
In November 2014, April and her husband opened River Rock Outfitter. April manages the company full-time bringing with her the many lessons learned building and managing programs. Of particular interest is community development. From the moment the shop opened, April started volunteering with Fredericksburg, Virginia Main Street. She was elected to the Main Street Board in January 2016 and served as the President from 2019-2020. She continues to volunteer with Main Street and other local nonprofits currently serving on the Board of Directors of Friends of the Rappahannock and the Kathmandu, Nepal Sister City.
In her spare time she works on her podcast the Business of Adventure, loves to paddle on the Rappahannock River, and hangs out with her three English Mastiffs.
Dr. David T. Mitchell is a founder of Disability Studies in the Humanities. His work along with his partner, Sharon Snyder, serves as a cornerstone of what has come to be known as cripqueer studies. Cripqueer studies foregrounds not only disability as an identity seeking inclusion and rights, but as an active verb exposing the necessity of structural critiques of normativity. Without disability we cannot fully know how marginalized bodyminds understand it, navigate it, critique it, and expose the cracks that define normativity as forms of docility instrumental to belonging. His academic and creative filmwork pursues alternative pathways on which the designation of incapacity often turns into an unexpected capacity. Thus, the marginalization, exclusion, erasure, and destruction of cripqueer lives results in fissures of our cultural knowledge base that must be crossed by intimacies that only disability experience, theory, and the arts can provide. In their first film, “Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back” (1995), Mitchell and Snyder unveiled the alternative interdependencies that inform what they call, crip culture, and deployed those non-normative practices as a critique of the Western myth of independence that is central to liberal humanist formulations of the Human. The film also demonstrated how disability queers all forms of being. Join Dr. David T. Mitchell on October 12th at 6:30 in the Digital Auditorium for a chance to hear him elaborate on these topics and be a part of the conversation.
CAREER WEEK ’23