Episode Details

Wendy Corr:

Hey there, folks, welcome to The Roundup. We're a Cowboy State Daily podcast, and we focus on really interesting people in the Cowboy State. Today's guest is such an interesting person! We started talking, and I'm like, holy cow, you do a lot! And really, really, a diverse and well experienced guest we have today in Mandy Fabel. Mandy is the executive director of Leadership Wyoming, which is a fantastic organization and really caters to business people, to leaders in Wyoming.

Before we get started, though, I want to make sure that our podcast listeners and viewers know about another great podcast for business people, for entrepreneurs, for even news junkies. You're going to want to check out Wyoming's top business podcast, 'Business from the Basement,' brought to you by the Wyoming Business Alliance. You can find them wherever you find our podcast here as well.

And Mandy Fabel - Mandy knows about the Wyoming Business Alliance. Mandy knows everybody in the state. My goodness. Mandy, you are so well connected. You talk to people every day whose lives are about bettering themselves, about bettering their communities!

And so I just wanted to say good morning, Mandy, and welcome, welcome to The Roundup. We're so glad you're here with us today.

Mandy Fabel:

Thank you. Wendy, I'm so glad to be here too and share some stories and have some fun.

Wendy Corr:

Mandy, tell us about Leadership Wyoming. Wyoming is so blessed to have these really forward thinking people in every community, and back in the year 2000 a group of people got together and said, You know what? We want to provide resources. We want to provide training to leaders. Tell us the story of Leadership Wyoming, Mandy.

Mandy Fabel:

Sure. So Leadership Wyoming was actually founded in conjunction with the Business Alliance, so there's a lot of overlap there. So you were right on. It was the then director of the Business Alliance, Bill Schilling, the President of the Senate, Eli Bebout, and then the President of the University of Wyoming, who got together, and there were similar programs in other states that they modeled it after, but they kind of put a very strong emphasis on making it a Wyoming program.

And so the idea was, bring together 40 leaders from across the state, so they can learn about the communities, get to know each other and grow as leaders. And so the class of 2001 was the first class to graduate, and Eli was actually in that class. Senator Bebout was in that class, as was Senator John Barrasso and several other sort of prominent Wyoming figures.

Bill often tells the story that they were really running the program more than he was. But that was the kickoff, and now almost 25 years later, so we'll have our class of 2025, this year. The program is so strong and still doing what that mission intended it to do, which is to develop leaders, to help people understand the issues facing Wyoming and to really embrace that mentality of a small town with long streets, make those streets a little smaller, kind of bring people together and share resources, share support, etc.

I came to the organization, I went through the class in 2017 - we can talk about that too, but had a great experience, and then ended up becoming the director. Bill left in 2018 or I guess, at the end of 2017 and I applied for and was able to become the director at that time.

And then in 2019 we actually separated from the Wyoming Business Alliance and Heritage Foundation, and now they are doing great work. Rennie is a dear friend of mine. He's a director there, and he's doing great work, and he's actually in one of our programs right now. And now we stand on our own with kind of just this focus on developing leaders outside of the political realm.

We deal in political topics, but we don't have a political leaning or political ag