The Marvelous Ms. Myriah

The founder of Shoes 4 Kidz is making the Sebastopol Chamber matter again

Chamber Director Myriah Volk

Myriah Volk is just killing it as the new director of the Sebastopol Chamber of Commerce. Membership in the Chamber has increased by an amazing 62% since Volk took over a year and a half ago. She oversaw a merger with the Sebastopol Downtown Association, goes to bat for local businesses before the city council, and is injecting new life into the Apple Blossom Festival. At events around town, she’s everywhere you look. We wondered how she came to do what she does. From athlete to actress to world traveler to nonprofit founder to chamber director, throughout her life, Volk has led with intuition and followed up with discipline and drive.

Volk was born in Los Angeles when her parents were in their early 20s.

“My dad was trying to make it as a musician in Hollywood,” she said. “And we stayed down there—I was the third child for them—before we moved to Shasta County for a while. My parents were real nature hippies. We live by a creek and it was beautiful. And then a couple of years into it, my mom wanted us to have opportunities to play sports and do more things, and there just weren't those opportunities there. So we moved to Santa Rosa when I was in first grade, and we moved to Healdsburg when I was a freshman in high school.”

A precocious athlete

Volk got involved in sports early on.

“I was a hyperactive child,” she said, “And so my parents just signed me up for every sport possible. I did everything: I did tap, ballet, gymnastics, swim team, tennis, soccer, softball, basketball. The three that stuck were soccer, basketball and softball.”

“When I got into middle school, I got really hyper-focused on sports and started playing at higher levels. Playing with boys. There were no girls basketball teams at that time so I played at the Santa Rosa Boys and Girls Club, and I was the only girl on the team. I wore pink Converse high tops.”

Then her focus switched to soccer.

“I got noticed by the Olympic development coaches and got invited to play on the California State team and traveled around with the State team. I got invited to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs,” she said. “They were trying to groom young girl soccer players because the Olympics were going to be, for the first time in 1996, doing girls soccer. It was such a cool experience. It taught me a lot about discipline. The coaches were the highest level, and they would give us so much life advice too. We’d be travelling in our California sweat suits and we were at airports, and they told us ‘On or off the field, you're always being evaluated.’ And that's one of the quotes that always has stuck with me. You are always being evaluated. The way you treat people, the way you interact. Not just ‘You’re great at soccer,’ but it's what kind of human being you are that matters. That was a good lesson.”

Volk was just starting high school when her family moved to Healdsburg, and she was immediately drafted to play with Healdsburg High’s award-winning girls’ varsity team, playing with 18 year olds when she was only 14.   

“At that time, Healdsburg had this dynasty girls basketball team. They hadn't lost a league game, and they were amazing. My dad would take me to watch them play.  So the summer before high school, I got really into basketball, and I practiced all the time.”

“I was like that with whatever sport I was doing,” Volk said. “Like when I played softball, if it was raining, I’d roll up balls of socks and pitch them in the hallway to my dad or to a wall or whatever. During basketball season, you'd see me everywhere with a basketball in my hand, just always practicing.”

 When Volk was on Healdsburg High’s girls basketball team, they went to two state championships.

“It was in my sophomore and junior year--and we lost them both, but playing in the Oakland Coliseum and Arco Arena when you're a teenager was amazing. I mean, just being in a stadium like that and getting to play was super cool.”

“And again, the life lessons that I take into my life now from sports about practicing to get better at things you're not good at. That's a tough one because as humans we're sort of drawn to do the things that we're good at. It's not as easy to focus on the things you don’t enjoy, and to say, “Hey, this is something I really need to work on.” In sports, it's maybe dribbling with your left hand, but in life it's something else—patience or whatever issue might be holding you back in some way in life. Sports just taught such good lessons.”

After high school, Volk was offered a basketball scholarship to play at Cal Poly, which meant more discipline and more practice.

“I played through my freshman and sophomore year. We went Division One which meant you're playing against the top-level girls. And we were practicing at 5:30 in the morning, and then again in the evening. And this is while you're trying to carry 16 units and go to school. Toward the end of my sophomore year, I was at practice, and I just wasn't loving it anymore,” she said.

“I felt like my whole life had been scheduled by sports since I was eight years old. And I was 20 now, and my life was still scheduled by sports and I was sort of under the thumb. I was on a scholarship so they were paying me to play this sport and that took some love out of it for me. We were about to get on a plane to go to a game in Montana, and we had an hour practice before we go to the airport. And I felt trapped. And I realized, ‘You know what: you're never trapped. You don't have to do this.’ And so after practice, I packed up my bag, emptied my locker, brought it to my coach and I said, ‘I don't love this anymore, and I'm not getting on the plane.’”

“It was really freeing for me,” Volk said. “I was, like, being an athlete has defined me, and what else am I? What else might I be good at?”

Acting up

Wondering what to do next, she saw an ad in a local newspaper for tryouts for a play at Cal Poly.

“I got the part for Glenda the Good Witch. And it was so fun. And after the Wizard of Oz, I was like, I'm going to be an actress. That's what I'm going to do.”

She did another play at Cal Poly in her junior year, and then made a momentous decision.

“Cal Poly is a great school academically, but I didn't enjoy the learning part, the classroom learning. My grades weren't good, and I felt like there were people who wanted to get into this school that didn't get in and I'm taking someone's seat who would want to be here. I was starting my senior year, and I decided I wasn't going to complete school. The feedback from my family and friends was ‘Just finish and then go.’ and I said ‘I can't. I don't want to. I want to explore the world and be free.’

She packed up her Volkswagen Beetle and moved to Hollywood.

“I got a little room in a lady's attic, with an air mattress and a bag of clothes. I got a job waitressing on Sunset Boulevard and started trying to find an agent—just by myself in Hollywood at 22 years old. Looking back. It's like ‘Wow, those were some bold decisions,’ but I never had any doubts. My intuition led me to do these things. And so when I was in Hollywood, I got an agent, Top Dog Talent Agency, and they started sending me on auditions.”

She noticed the sexism in the industry right off.

“I did not like the way the men treated the women. It bothered me immediately,” Volk said. “There were behaviors that made me super uncomfortable on a couple occasions, and I wasn't interested in playing that game.”

Although she went to a lot of auditions, she didn’t land many parts.

“I did a lot of work as an extra. I was an extra on Beverly Hills 90210, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Just Shoot Me with David Spade. Watching the way the film industry worked was fascinating to me—the way that actors were treated and treated other people. And after going on several auditions, I realized, ‘I don't think I'm very good at this.’ I wasn't taking acting classes or training. I was just auditioning and just exploring and being free and doing what I wanted to do, which felt great.”

She did get Screen Actor’s Guild card, however, and landed a speaking role on the mystery series, Diagnosis Murder with Dick Van Dyke. “I also got to dance with Dick Van Dyke in Malibu,” she said with a smile.

After two years, though, she moved back to Sonoma County—and back to waitressing.

“I didn't know what was next,” she said. “I never really had this plan like the traditional ‘You go to college; you meet this person; you get married; you have children by 30.’ My mind didn't function like that.”

The travel bug

Volk decided that she wanted to travel abroad and she threw herself into this with the usual gusto. First she took a job at a resort in Yucatan. Then she went to visit her brother— a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, who had just come back from Iraq and Afghanistan—in England. After hanging out with him for a week in Cambridge, she took the train to London on her own.

“In the main train station in London, I just went up to a group of Londoners and said, “Hey, I'm just here, and I want to get a job. Where would you go if you were me?” And they said go to Earls Court. So I did.”

She found a hostel for 15 pounds a night, where she was the only American.

“I had a few hundred bucks in my pocket, and again, that's another moment where I look back and go ‘Wow, that's a little scary.’ I didn't feel scared though. I just felt like everything would work out.”

She walked around town, popping into businesses and asking if they were hiring. Ultimately, she found a job in a place called the Leopard Lounge, where she worked for nine months before setting off to do a little more travelling, this time in the company of her mother and brother.

They travelled through France and Spain, and when they reached Barcelona, she told them they could go on without her.

“I just told them, ‘I need to stay here’. And I thought if I can get a job day one in London, I can do it anywhere.”

She applied the same combination of shoe leather and can-do gusto in Barcelona, but jobs there proved harder to come by. She spoke Spanish—a kind of Mexican Spanglish learned in Healdsburg—but that was no match for European Spanish or Catalan.

Ultimately she met up with a guy, a young American, who was organizing pub tours for tourists.  

“I started talking to him, and I said, ‘So you're doing pub crawls? Do you need any people to help you work them?’ And he said, ‘Sure, we need sales reps.’ So I said, ‘Well, I'll do it right now. Like, what do you need? I'll start today.’ So the guy hands me a stack of flyers, and he says, ‘Here's a stack of 100 flyers, put your initials on the back of each one. Go out into Barcelona, hand them out to people, and as many people come with your initials on them, I’ll give you five euros.’ So I hit Las Ramblas, a busy boulevard in Barcelona, and spoke to every single person I could.”

She turned up at one of the pubs that night to see if anyone turned up. There was a flood of people.

“And the guy was like, ‘This is the most people we've ever had at our pub crawls. You're hired! and I'm like, Thank God, desperate times call for desperate measures.”

Ultimately, the two became romantically involved, and as sometimes happens, Volk found herself pregnant.

“I remember we lived in this Gaudi-esque building on the fourth floor in Barcelona Village. I took the pregnancy test and went and sat on the balcony and I thought okay, if this is positive, everything changes right now.”

They moved back to the United States, got married at the courthouse in Marin, but decided for economic reasons to move closer to his family in North Carolina, where his mother ran two antique stores.

Volk loved being a mother and they had another baby right away, but soon Volk felt stifled by the conservative culture of the rural South—and stifled by her marriage. Though they travelled back to California together, the marriage was on the rocks. Volk moved to Sebastopol, a town she’d always liked, and tried to figure out how to make her way as a single mother.

She turned to what she knew best: sports. She started a basketball camp for toddlers, Little Hoopers, at the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center, and later started coaching in local schools and working as a personal trainer.

If the shoe fits

Coaching in schools, she noticed a surprising problem. Many kids didn’t have the proper shoes they needed for working out.

There was one boy that really touched her heart.

“There was a boy in fifth grade that was having a really hard time in his life—his dad was in jail—and he just loved running. It was really therapeutic for him. He was kind of showing signs of like early depression. And he came up to me before the mile run for the Presidential Fitness Test and he was embarrassed. He kind of took me aside he said ‘Hey, can you help me tape the sole back on my shoe so I can run?’ So I got electrical tape from the office taped up his shoe, and I was like, ‘This poor kid. Let's get him a pair of shoes.’ So I asked him if I could take a picture of the shoe. And I went home that night and I thought ‘You know, GoFundMe 's are getting big. What if I just show a picture of the shoe on a GoFundMe and send it out?’ And that GoFundMe just blew up. People could relate. And people were sharing it and donating and sharing again and I was like, wow, there's something to this. This is obviously needed. So the Press Democrat found out about it, and they wrote an article calling me the shoe fairy.”

With the help of an intern, she started the nonprofit, Shoes 4 Kidz. Jerry Robinson, the former NFL player who lives in Sonoma County, got involved in the organization and that took her fundraising efforts to a whole new level.

“I spent seven years running around the county giving shoes to whole sports teams at schools, giving to individuals. Sometimes I'd get a call from a school like, ‘We've got a kid that needs shoes NOW,’ and I would go immediately to the shoe store, get shoes and then deliver them.”

After seven years, though, she was ready for a new challenge so when she learned that longtime Sebastopol Chamber Director Linda Collins was retiring, she decided to apply.

“I never was like, ‘I want to be a chamber director when I grow up,’ but I've landed here and I feel like all of my experiences in my life have led me to this point. This is a job that's really about people. And I like people, and that's helpful in this position. What it really comes down to is getting to know the business owners as humans and getting to know their story and why they started doing whatever it is they're doing now. I see these small business owners as creative—they’re creators. They had an idea or a passion and they took it to fruition, and I have so much respect for that. And I like that this position gives me that freedom to be creative as well.

“I really just believe in following your intuition. I have followed my intuition in all different directions to be at this present moment. Everything I've done before, even though it’s a very wide variety of things, has led me to this point. It gives me a different perspective and an open mind. There's not just one way to do things; you can think outside of the box.”