Name: Chianne Coffman
City of residence: Windsor
Occupation: Owner of Chy Creative, founder of Glow Getters
What brought you to Windsor?
I have been living in Windsor with my husband for 22 years now. We live in Pelican Hills. We have two kids: I have a son who is driving now, and he goes to Windsor Charter Academy, and my daughter is 10, and she’s also at Windsor Charter Academy. Really active kids keep us busy.
I’m originally from Loveland. Loveland High was my high school; I was the class of 2001. My son plays baseball with Windsor High School, and when we’re playing Windsor High, it brings back so many memories. This area, Northern Colorado, is my home. It’s been amazing raising kids here.
What do you do for work?
When my son was born, I decided I wanted to take his newborn photos. My degree is in graphic design; I have a degree from the Art Institute of Colorado, and photography just came naturally. I’ve always explored photography, so using my graphic design skills, I merged into photography as well. Chy Creative was born, and it’s a graphic design photography studio. We call it “boutique photography” because you don’t hire me to do your scrapbook photos. It’s more for large artwork on the wall, or if you want to put up a big display in a business or town.
I just looked at my hard drive, and it has millions of files. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years—25 maybe—so there’s lots of data there. It’s been amazing watching families I photographed 18 years ago whose kids are now graduating high school, and I do their senior photos. I think my favorite part about my job is that we’re not transactionally based; we really get to know our clients, so it’s more building relationships and rapport that way, and it lasts. I want to stay in these people’s lives, and they become our friends.
Tell us about your work with the Photography Business Institute.
The Photography Business Institute is an international school for photographers to help them better their business. I’m sure you’ve heard of the starving artist. So many photographers out there are in the shoot-and-burn model, which means they’re basically selling digitals for a very low amount of money, and when you divide that out, they’re making $5 an hour.
At the Photography Business Institute, I was one of three senior coaches for six years, and I helped photographers elevate their business so that they could turn it into a mindset shift that allowed them to be a six-figure business. I helped them with branding, design and the strategy of growing a business. With the hundreds of people I’ve had the privilege of working with, really it comes down to mindset. It comes down to their belief in themselves. And once that’s altered and changed and they have that confidence to stand on, the sky’s the limit. It was awesome seeing them bloom.
How did you form the Glow Getters nonprofit?
Glow Getters is my passion. I started it in 2021, so it was during COVID, but there are a lot of little stories leading up to that. For one, I was raised by a single mom, and we were in poverty for most of my life, living in government housing and popping around. Glow Getters serves 9- to 14-year-old girls only, and that time in my life was so hard. I mean, all of us girls can relate to that. It’s for the middle school-age girl going into that, just trying to find herself and find who her friends are. It’s that time of self-discovery and not having any guidance. I didn’t when I was young because my mom worked so many jobs. I was home alone a lot, so that’s a part of it.
The other part that began Glow Getters was that I had the privilege of going with Saruni International, a nonprofit out of Greeley, as their photographer, to a girls rescue center in Kenya, Africa. During that time, just seeing those girls and how they’re being raised, literally with nothing, find this rescue center because they were escaping the cultural norms that women go through there…all of a sudden they had education, food and shelter, and they weren’t fighting every day just for survival. They could grow, and they could make friends. So my heart grew even more for this age group of girls. No matter where you live in the world, I think every girl goes through a set of lessons during these ages.
When COVID hit, all of our young people went into isolation. It does something to your state of mind, and I just felt that, as a woman who has built a business and been through some really hard things, that I could reach down and grab that generation and lift them up and empower them to thrive. So Glow Getters was born, and like all things in my life, it has many layers. It’s a complicated nonprofit organization in that there’s so much to it, but that’s how I roll.
What is Glow Getters?
We started off with 18 girls. We’ve consistently, for the last two years, had between 35 and 40 girls attend. Once you’re a Glow Getter, you’re always a Glow Getter, and it’s free to be a part of Glow Getters. The first thing you would do as a new, first-year girl is you would go online and fill out an application. This application helps us to get very specific to that girl when it comes to the event itself. We give them a call, and we schedule an in-person consultation first. They meet with myself, the founder of Glow Getters, and also our treasurer, Rachel Pranckh, who is one of my best friends. We sit down, and we really dive into this girl. We want to get to know her. We want her to get to know us.
Then we—Chy Creative—donate a professional photo session to all the first-year girls. But we do it a little differently because it’s not individual girls. They get in as a group. This year, we had 10 first-year girls, and they all got their photo session together. They could go change into as many outfits as they wanted. We have racks of clothes and props and all the fun stuff. We’re literally rolling out the red carpet for these girls. They each get their individual time during their photo session. Then we use those photos for their Glow Books; at the event, they each get a Glow Book. Their photos are put in the books, and we get to surprise them with their photos at the event. The event is held every second week of June, so we just had our fifth annual event.
At the event itself, they just get spoiled, because at the heart of Glow Getters is that every girl is seen and heard. Had I had that when I was young, I would have learned lessons so much quicker, and I would have had guidance so much quicker. How much sooner would I have discovered my own strengths? How much sooner would I have been able to believe in myself and my dreams? So that’s the ultimate goal with Glow Getters.
Through the Glow Books, the girls network with each other to exchange information. It’s like an amplified yearbook they take home so that they can reach out to their new friends and start building those friendships. There’s also vision boarding, which is a fan favorite. Each girl gets a starter kit that has specific clippings that pertain to them that we preselect so they’re not just staring at a blank canvas. And of course, we have big community bins of clippings. They can say, “Hey, you like butterflies? Here’s a butterfly.” They can express themselves a little bit and get to know one another.
We strategically sit each girl next to another girl she doesn’t know who we feel like she’ll find an affinity for. We’re not about clicks or bullying. We have zero tolerance for that, and we’ve never had an issue with it. We want you to come in with an open mind and open arms and be a girl who supports other girls because, as a woman, you want to support other women. There’s so much empowerment that can come from supporting rather than tearing down.
We have girls from all walks of life. We have girls who are living in poverty. We also have girls who are living in million-dollar homes. I like to stress this point because just because a girl lives in a nice neighborhood or a nice home does not mean that her inside matches that. And the opposite too: Just because a girl lives in poor circumstances doesn’t mean she isn’t this vibrant, energetic person. When we get all the girls together and sit them next to each other, it’s amazing to see each one come in without knowing where the others live or anything about them other than, “This girl next to me likes this, so do I like this?” All of a sudden they’re friends.
This year we did something really cool for the event. Every girl gets a T-shirt, and on the back is her specific word. My word of the year is “empower.” That goes with my kids, and that goes with Glow Getters, just everything throughout my life. This year, I want to be empowering to others. So each girl had their own word on the back of their shirt, which, again, is a way that they don’t feel lost in a crowd.
What happens when the girls age out of Glow Getters?
We’re really big on serving our community, so we have community service opportunities. During their first year, we talk about what their dreams are, and we try to help them understand their own strengths. As they age out, we want to continue to support that dream, and we want to continue to encourage them to pursue their goals. We let them know that it’s OK if their dream changes. I’m not a marine biologist, but I wanted to be one when I was 9.
We also decided to start building a scholarship fund. We call it our Glow Getters Gives scholarship fund, and we’re trying to solicit like-minded businesses to jump onboard to contribute to the scholarship fund. In order to qualify for the scholarship fund, a girl has to have come to Glow Getters for at least two years, and she has to participate in one of our community service outreaches—our most famous one is Pack A Pack. She would also need to come back after she ages out to help raise the next generation of young girls, whether that’s coming in to speak, volunteer at one of the events or be a mentor.
We are thrilled to have Amiyah Torres come in this year. She is now 16, going on 17. She’s a student at Windsor High School, and she was one of our original Glow Getters. She’s coming in to do her speech, and that gives me an opportunity to mentor her through that speech. Her speech was in paragraph form, so we bulleted it out and added some hooks and conclusions. I felt like I could really pour into her. The knowledge I have through being a senior coach at the Photography Business Institute helped. I did a lot of speeches. So it’s fun to be able to coach them beyond Glow Getters at a more mature age and know where they came from.
Amiyah now qualifies to apply for the scholarship, and she’s going into her senior year, so that’ll be really exciting. She wants to be a psychologist. We would love, at Glow Getters, to support her.
What do you love most about living in Windsor?
I feel like Windsor is a protected nest of really amazing people who are like-minded in the sense that we are just hardworking. It’s a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of young families. I’m finding some of my best friends here, and I’m in my 40s. I think it’s because the community is so welcoming. There’s been a lot of growth happening in our community, but I feel like the heart of it is still safe. I feel like my kids are safe. I feel like our home that we’ve lived in for 22 years is our sanctuary. There are a lot of small businesses in Windsor that are so fun to support, and they’re owned by our friends, so that’s even cooler.
If you were showing a friend or family member around Northern Colorado for a day or weekend, what would you take them to go do?
Our family loves to go to the concerts in the park. Windsor does them at the lake every Thursday. They have new bands come in, and it’s a lot of fun. The kids run around, and there’s vendors and food trucks. If grass is not your thing, you could always get an outdoor patio table at the Hearth Restaurant and Pub and have the same kind of music experience, just a little more intimate.
Honestly, I would also be like, “Let’s go watch my son play baseball.” We’re at the ballfield all the time. His club team, NOCO Baseball, is extremely good. They won all three state championships last year. So I’m like, “Come watch my kid.” I’m really proud of him.
When we’re not at the ballfield, we’re outdoors a lot. I may or may not have signed my husband up for outdoor sand volleyball, and it’s a competitive-ish league. It’s more of a beer league, which is super fun. It’s at The Grainhouse every Tuesday (it’s an adult league), and we won our first game and got our free pitcher of beer. That’s another thing I love about Windsor: It matches the vibe of our family. It’s fluid and lowkey. People don’t go around town all fancy. You’re just who you are. There are very genuine people.
What’s something unique about yourself that you’d like to share?
I’m writing an autobiography. It’s something I’ve worked on for a long time. It’s one of those stop-and-go projects. I had open heart surgery when I was young, and right after that, my parents divorced. So my childhood really tells a story about who I’ve become, being an only child. I wanted to find a way to show my kids that journey in case anything were to ever happen to me down the road. They would know my history. So that’s why I wrote the book. A lot of people don’t know that I write books.
I also have a children’s book that I wrote for the nonprofit Sierra’s Race Against Meningitis. They’re family friends of ours. They do a lot of work with educating young people about the dangers of meningitis: sharing chopsticks, doing that sort of thing. Fifteen years ago, I wrote a children’s book for them, and when they sell it, they get the funds, so it was a completely donated project. There are thousands of copies out there, and it was really fun to be able to write for them.
What fun plans do you have for this summer?
This summer is the first summer in 13 years that I am taking off work. I’ve decided that I only have three years left with my son being at home before he goes to college, and I really want to focus on my family. My husband, Mark, can afford that for me, which is amazing, so I’m taking the opportunity to do that. My son and I are taking a mother-son trip: We’re flying to Newark, and he’s doing a showcase for a lot of D1 schools that will be there for baseball. We’re going to a Yankees game, and we’re going to Central Park, so that’ll be fun. Then we’re flying down to North Carolina and meeting up with my husband and daughter, who are driving the RV out with our dog. Some of our friends have a vacation home out there, and they’re allowing us to stay there, then we’ll drive all the way back.
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