21 May 2011 Answered prayer leads to ‘perfect’ job
What Shellie O’Quinn likes best about her job – which she considers just about perfect – is working with people.
As director of the Greenbrier City Event Center, Shellie works to provide activities for Greenbrier residents, so that they don’t have to leave town for entertainment.
Some of the events she has planned this year are an arts and crafts fair, which will be Saturday, Sept. 24; yard sales; pancake breakfasts; and a spring health fair. The most successful event is the annual summer “Cool Kidz Camp” for children in third to fifth grade. The event always has a child-pleasing educational theme. This year’s theme is “CSI.”
“It’s a lot of work, and I’m exhausted afterward,” Shellie said.
After graduating from the University of Arkansas in 1995 with a degree in landscape architecture, Shellie went to work for the Little Rock Parks Department, where she had interned during college. She loved that job, too, and spent 10 years in the role during a period of prosperity and growth. She participated in several large projects, including the Otter Creek Soccer Park, for which she served as general contractor.
“I learned there that I enjoyed public-sector work,” she said. “I had a great boss, and I worked with some wonderful people.”
But Little Rock grew, money got tight, the staff was reduced even as the job got larger and Shellie’s stress increased accordingly.
In 2005, Shellie accepted the position at the new event center in her hometown.
“I had been praying for three years that God would just open a door,” she said. “I wasn’t happy, and I didn’t know where He wanted me to be.”
Then her mother-in-law, Judy O’Quinn, saw an ad in the paper about the event center job and encouraged Shellie to apply. Shortly after Shellie got the job, gasoline prices skyrocketed; she was grateful not to be driving daily to Little Rock.
Shellie likes her current boss, Mayor Melton Cotton, because he is a visionary. The event center was his idea. The mayor recently gave Shellie another great idea: “The Great Outdoors Expo,” a hunting and fishing show. The first one is scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 17.
Shellie and her staff of nine do the cleaning and maintenance themselves, hiring professionals only for big jobs. Shellie’s management style is collaborative.
“I try to include [my employees] as much as possible in any decisions because they’re on the front lines,” she said. “I don’t ask them to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.”
Shellie and her husband, Devo, have been married 13 years and own a business together – Door-to-Door, LLC – which keeps Devo busy. Currently, they are training to become foster parents.
“We have always talked about it, even before we were married,” Shellie said.
They say they plan to foster older children because that is the biggest need.
“It will be a challenge, I know,” she said.
But Shellie loves teenagers and works with them at Greenbrier Church of the Nazarene, where she is a small-group leader for the ninth-grade girls. She also plays bass guitar in the church’s praise band and occasionally sings.
The couple recently purchased a new home on the north shore of Beaverfork Lake. They had planned to build, but couldn’t find a piece of property that suited them. Then, “we just found the perfect house.”
In reflecting on what she considers her perfect job, Shellie has difficulty thinking of anything she would change. She said she wished the center had a second, smaller, community room for meetings. And she is already working to make her other wish – an after-school program for children – a reality.
