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Dr. Claudia Beeny has always been passionate about people. Whether it was during her time as a resident assistant or helping college students through her work in higher education, Dr. Beeny has dedicated her life to helping others. Her kindness and compassion are especially evident through her nonprofit, House of Shine, which exists solely to help everyone ages 5-95 discover and build upon what makes them unique.
Since starting House of Shine 14 years ago on her own, the entity has grown to include a headquarters in downtown Grapevine, along with eight full-time staff members and seven regular volunteers. Together they provide a wide variety of self-discovery workshops, events and interactive programming specifically tailored for adults, youths and parents. With year 15 now on the horizon, Dr. Beeny has no intention of slowing down her mission of self-discovery.
A FOUNDATION IN EDUCATION
Growing up the daughter of a teacher, coaching young girls in gymnastics and serving as a camp counselor, education was always in the cards for Dr. Beeny.
“I think I have been a teacher my entire life,” Dr. Beeny says. “Even when I was a little girl, I would play school with my best friend… it’s truly in my DNA.”
When she entered college at Arizona State University, her love of helping others led to her taking a position as a resident assistant (RA).
“I would love all of my RA-related activities,” Dr. Beeny says. “One day somebody said, ‘You know you can do this as a career?’ and I just had no idea.”
That one suggestion set the path for Dr. Beeny’s life. After receiving her undergraduate degree, she attended the University of Georgia and got her Master of Education in college student counseling and personnel services.
“I always thought [counseling students] was just super important work because what we’re really doing is building that next generation of leaders who are going out into the world,” Dr. Beeny says. “It always felt very important and meaningful.”
For the next decade, Dr. Beeny worked on college campuses across the country like Miami University and Southern Methodist University, working as the assistant director of resident life and the director of new student programs, respectively. Then in 2000, feeling a call to immerse herself in the college curricula, she returned to the University of Georgia to get a Ph.D. of Philosophy in higher education and administration. After receiving her doctorate in 2003, Dr. Beeny worked as the dean of students at Bellarmine University, then as director of freshman seminar, instructor and grant administrator at the University of North Texas.
“College campuses are different from K-12 schools because in K-12, they’re teaching content. But in higher education, they’re actually generating the knowledge that they’re then teaching in high schools,” Dr. Beeny says. “I wanted to be a part of the group that was creating knowledge and content.”
FORGING HER PATH
While working with college students eagerly looking to find their way in life, Dr. Beeny began brainstorming a methodology she calls “Shine” for helping people toward self-discovery. The word itself also serves as an acronym for strengths, hobbies, interests, needs and experiences — all important aspects of what makes a person unique.
“‘Shine’ is a piece of who I am as a human being,” Dr. Beeny says. “People will contribute commensurate with what they’re good at and how good they feel about their contributions. Our best contributions are embedded in our talents and strengths.”
Developing that message started with a simple task that Dr. Beeny confronted with fierce determination: writing a blog.
“Through the act of writing six days a week for six years, what really began to happen is my life philosophy began to emerge,” Dr. Beeny says. “I realized I was actually writing about excellence. I was writing about people in the community who were standing out, going above and beyond and making real contributions that mattered. That quickly became people who shine.”
Developing this method through her blogging, it didn’t take long for Dr. Beeny to realize how fulfilling this work was to her. While preparing a lesson plan, Dr. Beeny realized she needed a change. Teaching an essay about the difference between rivers and floods, Dr. Beeny’s eyes opened to the fact that she was living like a flood — which is unruly and dangerous — and she wanted to be more like a river, with boundaries and parameters.
“I was trying to do all these different things… and I just closed the book and realized I didn’t want to be a flood anymore,” Dr. Beeny says. “I wanted to be a river.”
After finishing her final semester working in higher education in 2011, she set out to manifest her own shine and never looked back.
MANIFESTING SHINE
Dr. Beeny was a one-person team for a while, spreading the Shine method through blog posts, which continued to gain readers and popularity. Eventually, with a desire to begin creating the method’s curriculum, she hired a graphic designer named Maureen as House of Shine’s first full-time employee to help bring her words to life through design.
“I’m an ideas person. I have a lot of ideas… but I don’t know how to make any of it look good,” Dr. Beeny says. “Maureen knows how to take my ideas and how to make them look like a million bucks. So I will maintain to this very day that one of the reasons we are as far along as we are is because people looked at our material and thought we were this very large operation when in reality, it was just the two of us cranking all of this work out.”
The content and curriculum created were used to go into schools and teach it to students so they could discover their unique strengths and talents. As helpful as the curriculum was in schools, Dr. Beeny and Maureen began aiming even higher. They knew the next step for the Shine message was to build a physical space where teachers, students and the community could visit and where the efforts on how to Shine were more focused.
“It started as a blog. Then it [became] curriculum that was taught in schools,” Dr. Beeny says. “Eventually, we gained enough momentum and interest that we were able to open our own physical space.”
The momentum that carried the Shine method from a curriculum to a physical space was partly due to a fourfold increase in grant support from its inception in 2014 to 2019.
But turning the Shine message into a physical location was no easy feat as there was reasonable apprehension about moving forward with buying a building and all of its inherent responsibilities.
“For me, it was very scary,” Dr. Beeny says. “Thankfully, I surround myself with great people. There were other folks on our team that just said, ‘We got this. We have all the content we need, and we have a following. The only thing that we need to do is not be fearful and take the plunge.’”
The journey to opening the House of Shine began with a hunt, looking around Southlake, Grapevine and Colleyville for the perfect spot.
“It was so important to me that the place feels like a community and every piece of the building should have that energy that just feels like it’s a thriving community,” Dr. Beeny says.
While nice, the larger spaces Dr. Beeny and her team toured did not exude the communal spirit they were trying to build.
“I just couldn’t wrap my head around how we were going to make these very large, 12,000-square-foot spaces feel like a community,” Dr. Beeny says.
Everything changed, however, when the team came upon a smaller location — sitting around 3,000 square feet — at 334 S. Barton St. in Grapevine.
“When we walked in, it was unbelievable,” Dr. Beeny says. “Immediately, I knew. The light that was streaming in through the windows was amazing. It just felt right.”
Everything fell into place from there, and Dr. Beeny and her team closed on the building in November 2019.
“I had been thinking about [a physical space], whether or not I acknowledged it,” Dr. Beeny says. “I know these ideas had been running through my head for the last 14 years, and all of the content already existed. It was really just a matter of matching content to physical spaces, and that was not hard at all.”
After nearly a year of renovations, House of Shine officially opened its doors in September 2020.
“When I walked into this space, there was something about it that I cannot actually verbalize what happened to me,” says Chelsea Troxler, House of Shine’s managing director. “It was an emotional feeling that I couldn’t express — that I could feel.”
Visitors of all ages are immediately greeted by plenty of bright colors, natural light and friendly faces. The Shine Lab takes up most of the nonprofit’s first room, where volunteers or staff members take guests through the method.
The building also includes a space affectionately named the School Bus. It’s a long room painted bright yellow that can accommodate over 30 kids for story time, art classes, field trips and other fun activities.
And every aspect of the building is dedicated to the cause. The hallway is affectionately named the GalleRay, after House of Shine’s anthropomorphic lightbulb of a mascot Ray Wattson, and features artwork chronicling his many adventures. Meanwhile, a conference room features a large Lazy Susan table perfect for lively conversations and team-building activities for corporate clientele.
Members of the community — from families and friends to co-workers and colleagues — can also take a seat in the commons, which is full of tables and comfy chairs to relax in.
“Everything in here revolves around the Shine framework,” Chelsea says. “I think what I love the most is that I know it’s real. It’s so tangible of what we’re doing.”
Even the bathrooms are dedicated to self-discovery. One of the bathroom’s walls is covered in pages from the book “Colorstrology: What Your Birthday Color Says About You” so visitors can search for their birthday and learn from what they read.
“There’s not a person that comes in here that doesn’t say that when they leave, they feel better, happier, more joyful and more proud,” Dr. Beeny says. “It’s a happy place.”
THE MESSAGE IN ACTION
Spreading the Shine message and method isn’t just about the physical spaces of its building. House of Shine creates exhibits for guests of all ages to come in and experience, hosts workshops for visitors from every walk of life and is always available to help anyone from a child to a corporate executive through the process of self-discovery.
The first exhibit at House of Shine was called “Life Maps: A Journey Back To My 12-Year-Old Self,” and featured notable individuals including famed sportscaster Lewis Johnson, who has worked for most every major TV network from NBC and CBS to ABC to ESPN.
“What it was doing was challenging people to think about how the experiences in their life got them from where they were all the way up to who they are today,” Dr. Beeny says.
The new interactive exhibit, entitled “Opportunity Knocks,” is both a literal and physical metaphor of life that helps people unlock their potential.
“This exhibit is really designed to get people thinking about doors opening, doors closing and how the choices and the decisions they make actually help impact the journey that they take through their lives,” Dr. Beeny says.
Meanwhile, some of the nonprofit’s workshop offerings include What’s Your Shine? — a three-part series anyone can take that focuses on discovering your Shine, Rise & Shine — a monthly program designed for women to learn about aspects of themselves, and Discover Your Strengths — a workshop that centers around Gallup’s StrengthsFinder 2.0.
“I think that’s really the power of the message,” Chelsea says. “It’s not like when you come to a class, you close the book and you leave. You actually get to access these tools every single day, utilize them and live your dream.”
SPREADING THE SHINE
Since opening, House of Shine’s message has spread beyond its walls. In 2020, Dr. Beeny wrote a book titled “What’s Your Shine? A Method For Discovering Who You Are And Why It Matters.” The nonprofit also set up a small outpost at the OH WOW! The Roger & Gloria Jones Children’s Center for Science & Technology in Youngstown, Ohio.
But that isn’t the only expansion House of Shine has on the horizon. The nonprofit is experimenting with a plan to scale and grow its popular monthly women’s program, the Rise & Shine workshop, and offer it in Frisco and Dallas next year.
And House of Shine reached a significant milestone earlier this year when it comes to the Shine method. The nonprofit graduated its sixth class of Shineologists — people trained in the methodology and go out helping people and spreading the Shine message. Whether it's through exhibits, workshops, her book or just by connecting with people she meets, Dr. Beeny is proud to help people on their journey toward self-discovery.
“There’s not anything that we do in life, from relationships to goals to interactions with other [people], that doesn’t demand us to know who we are,” she expresses. “When we don’t know who we are, we trip and stumble way more than we need to. So the process of self-discovery is like literally handing you a roadmap and saying, ‘Here’s how to maneuver and navigate the situation based on what you know about self.’”
And though she does have hobbies outside of House of Shine such as spending time with her family and friends, reading and going on walks, she doesn’t tire of the work she does.
“It’s who I am,” Dr. Beeny says. “It’s my point of intersection. It is me using my talents and my interests to fill a need that I know the world needs.”
Hear from Dr. Beeny in person at our 2022 Women’s Luncheon, presented by AT&T, on Oct. 21. Reserve your tickets today at 817Tix.com.