FUND-RAISER,
ELECTRONIC JOURNALIST
Role Model Shelby Holliday
sets an impressive example
Written by SHARON ALMIRALL
Photography by STEVE GROER
Her enthusiasm is contagious. Her commitment
to the new way of doing journalism is infectious.
For Shelby Holliday, off to a quick start in
her areas of interest — business and journalism — life presents all sorts of exciting opportunities, and she is
glad to show others how to maximize their opportunities.
She’s a role model extraordinaire.
Holliday, a Cherry Creek High School graduate, started working
in the community while still a high school student. While participating
in charitable events with Young Americans Bank in
Denver, she met Linda Childears, president of the bank.
“She was an incredible role model,” Holliday now says. “She
showed me how much potential there is for women in our world — especially in business. I would lead meetings of 12 to 15 kids,
and it was very meaningful work in leadership and business.”
Childears became the president and CEO of the Daniels
Fund, a $1 billion foundation, in 2005. Before that, she had
been president of the Young Americans Bank since its opening
in 1987. She hd worked with cable pioneer Bill Daniels to
plan and organize the innovative bank.
It was this woman who inspired Shelby Holliday. The experience
of leading groups and working on charitable events took Holliday down a very satisfying path with her sorority at the
University of San Diego, where she is a senior. She helped to
raise more than $65,000 for Alpha Phi to support the Alpha Phi
Foundation’s Cardiac Care in conjunction with the American
Heart Association’s Go Red for Women movement. Holliday
says she acquired the donations and put together the auction, “just like any charitable event.” The results were astonishing.
“We had no idea we’d do so well. We just wanted to raise as
much money as some other colleges. Now, we’re the leading
Alpha Phi chapter in the nation for fund raising,” says Holliday.
Considering this activity “defining role-model behavior,”
Holliday says, “We learned so much through doing the event
just how serious heart disease is for women. It wasn’t hard to
get donations. We had our committees, and I had all of them
doing donation hunting. I love it — working with other girls and
women. At the end of the event, you feel like you’ve done so
much. Our sorority does important work. I don’t think when
girls join sororities that they think they’ll be doing fund raising
or charitable work. You realize doing something like this makes
your experience in a sorority much more significant.”
Everyone worked really well together. For example,
Holliday was able to put together a weekend in the Big Apple.
The package included a luxurious weekend for two at a boutique
hotel in Manhattan, four passes to the NBC Top of the
Rock Observatory Deck, a Lonely Planet Guide to New York
City and two “I Love New York” T-shirts.
This go-for-it young woman had never been one to sit back.
As a high school student, she was a competitive athlete, playing basketball and running in cross country events. Her basketball
prowess took her to the University of San Diego, where
she intended to play, but a back injury nipped her basketball
career in the bud. Having to redirect her focus didn’t daunt her
at all, and she realized she loved the university, so she stayed
to study business with a minor in communications.
Holliday has put in some time at assistant level positions in
the magazine-publishing world. Last summer, she helped a
fashion director at Women’s Health Magazine and worked in
the photo and features department at Shape magazine. Her
experience also includes being a contributor for the publication
944, a San Diego magazine. She enjoys the work, saying, “It’s always new, always changing, always fascinating.”
Communications work has taken Holliday further into the
new arena of electronic publishing. She is the San Diego
reporter for ThePalestra.com, an electronic magazine that has
as its tagline “Where the world goes to college.” Contributing
two to four stories a week to the online news and entertainment
magazine for the Internet generation, she carries a camera,
a Canon ZR800 mini-DV courtesy of ThePalestra.com, in
her purse and chooses a topic to cover. She takes the
footage, edits it, downloads it, produces it, does the voice
work and then sends it electronically to ThePalestra.com.
During the California wildfires last fall, she interviewed kids
who were going out to help “Josh,” who had lost his home
to a wildfire. Showing her unabashed love for the new medium,
she says, “I believe video is the wave of the future. It is
so convenient.”
She expands her enthusiasm to explain just why she loves
it so much: “I like writing and delivering news to kids in my
generation and like to get them involved, because it’s my passion.
I want to reach kids my age because people need to
know what’s going on, and I want to inform them. The
biggest mistake that mainstream media make is they don’t
cater to kids my age. If you can use Facebook and YouTube,
and they can see what you’re doing, that’s a good thing.”
In a recent edition of ThePalestra.com, Holliday was billed
as “showing us how to bake scrumptious cookies.” In her
cookie-baking story, she was engaging and showed how
much she enjoyed what she was doing. She says she would
love to do broadcast journalism.
Holliday is still working in ink on paper, too, as she writes
her sorority’s newsletter. She says she has had a live journal
blog since high school. She began her writing career in high
school for the school newspaper. Her dad was a journalism
major in college, and she got “the bug” from him, even
though he now works in the area of finance.
Her parents, Nancy and Jeff Holliday, were influential as
role models. Jeff was a basketball coach and took Holliday to
swimming, out running and playing golf and tennis. “He’s
been very influential in my athletic life,” Holliday says. She
says her mom “is very supportive, encouraging.”
Crediting her parents with never saying she couldn’t do
something, Holliday explains, “My parents will be supportive
of whatever I choose. Dad always said, go beat the boys.”
The Hollidays are also supportive of Shelby’s two siblings,
a brother who is a student at Cherry Creek High School and a
sister who plays soccer at San Diego State.
For this energetic 21-year-old role model, nothing seems
out of the question. Whether raising money for a good cause,
doing cutting-edge journalism for her peers, or showing other
people her age that anything is possible, Shelby Holliday is at
the top of her game.
