2026 Women of Western Wake

Every year, this issue starts with the same quiet astonishment: How much can one person build when she decides not to wait for permission? This year’s honorees prove it in different directions — through a dental chair, a downtown office, a school, a storefront. Different fields, different decades, different starting points, but the same throughline running underneath it all: showing up until the thing they imagined became real for everyone else. Meet Dr. Bobbi Stanley, Joanna Helms, Mandy Becker, Susan Weis, and Dr. Mariah Walker — five women who built what nobody handed them.

Mandy Becker

Owner, Swagger Boutique

Mandy Becker was stepping off an elevator in Puerto Rico when a stranger stopped her. Although Mandy was thousands of miles from either of her stores, the woman clearly recognized her and said, “I just watched a video of you! I love your boutique.” Living, as Mandy puts it, “far away from San Juan,” the odds of running into a Swagger customer had felt close to zero.

Yet it wasn’t the only time she and the boutique have been recognized unexpectedly. A customer once spotted a former Swagger buyer in a European airport. A longtime boutique manager who moved away gets stopped to this day in and around Wilmington.

“Isn’t that crazy?” Mandy asks sincerely.

After all, it’s the kind of brand recognition most retailers spend decades chasing. Although Mandy started her business almost 25 years ago, it was influenced by an offhand comment she couldn’t fully appreciate at the time.

She was 22, fresh off an internship, and telling her boss she’d just accepted an engineering job at GE.

“You have too much swagger,” Mandy says he told her. “It’s not going to work for corporate America. You’re going to own your own business one day.”

Joanna Helms

Director, Apex Economic Development

Twelve years ago, Joanna Helms walked into The Depot in downtown Apex as a department of one. There was no playbook, no precedent. All Joanna had was a mandate to build an economic development department from scratch in a town that was one of the last in Wake County to decide it needed one.

Today, the economic development team of five is closing out a chapter that will reshape the entire region: a 230-acre, 500-bed standalone children’s hospital — the second largest in the country — rising out of the ground in Apex’s Veridea development.

“I’ve never had a project like this one,” Joanna says. “I’ve never had a project that was so impactful.”

When the North Carolina Economic Development Association handed her the state’s top honor for the deal, she cried. She’s quick to clarify that her reaction wasn’t because of the award itself, but because of what it means. NC Children’s Hospital will be the only standalone pediatric hospital within a five-state radius staffed entirely by doctors, nurses, and technicians trained exclusively in pediatric care. It’s expected to create 5,000 jobs, and Wake Tech is already building a specialized nursing program to feed it.

“It’s not just an Apex project,” Joanna explains. “It’s not even just a North Carolina project.”

Dr. Bobbi Stanley

Owner & Dentist, Stanley Dentistry

In the early 1990s, a new patient walked into Stanley Dentistry. Checkbook in hand, he was ready to pay before he sat down and filled out the line for the doctor’s name: Dr. Robert Stanley. The internet barely existed at the time, and a solo female dentist named “Bobby” didn’t compute. So he wrote a check to a doctor who wasn’t real.

Dr. Bobbi Stanley, DDS, still laughs telling that story, mostly because of how far things have come since. Thirty-three years later, she has built one of Cary’s longest-running dental practices from a single leased storefront into a family operation in the truest sense — one that includes her husband, a second-career dentist she gets to work beside every single day (who, coincidentally, is named Dr. Robert Stanley).

Stanley Dentistry opened in the early ’90s in the Preston Corners shopping center, a location Dr. Bobbi picked with the same instinct she would later apply to patient care, hiring, and just about everything else in her life. Fresh out of dental school, she walked into Cary’s Town Hall and asked which direction the town was growing. After being told it was pushing out toward Preston, she went looking for the shopping center rumored to be built there, found the right people to talk to, and signed a lease before she’d even treated a single patient.

“I opened the doors with one employee and prayed that somebody would walk through the door,” she says. Fortunately, being wedged between an ice cream shop and a video rental store meant foot traffic. Families would pick up a movie for the night, then wander over for a sweet treat. Brochures for the practice were tucked in a box by the door, and Dr. Bobbi recalls how she “would come in every Monday morning and all the brochures were gone. I had my own advertisement right there,” she says.

Dr. Mariah Walker

Principal, Wake Young Women’s Leadership Academy

Today’s your watering day. You can’t skip today. You have to come to school.

That’s what Dr. Mariah Walker used to tell her students — ostensibly about the plants she kept on the windowsills of her English classroom. The plants in her “little indoor garden,” and the ones that still hang in her office windows today, represent a small, quiet reflection of something that has run through Mariah’s entire career: Plant something, tend it, and watch it grow into what it was meant to be.

That classroom was never quite big enough, though, because Mariah was also running an unofficial safe harbor inside it. For any student who’d been sent out of another class, who had spotty attendance, or who needed somewhere to land that wasn’t home and wasn’t trouble, she offered an open seat. “Just come to a safe space where you won’t be getting in trouble,” she’d tell them. “You can sit in my room. Just be in the back, and you’ll get stuff done.”

When the room was consistently full past capacity, Mariah went to her principal. “I need to teach more kids,” she told her. “I need to be able to create more opportunity.” Her hope was that she could teach in the gym or the auditorium and be assigned more students.

But the principal explained that although Mariah was doing her kids a service, she couldn’t personally fix every student’s day. What she could do was change the building’s climate so that kids wanted to go to their other classes. “You need to think about how you can change a whole school dynamic,” her principal had said. It was Mariah’s first nudge toward administration, and the first time someone suggested that her instinct to make more room for people wasn’t just a classroom habit. It was leadership.

Susan Weis

Communications Director, Town of Fuquay-Varina

In 2003, the town of Fuquay-Varina looked quite different — home to only about 10,000 residents, many of the beloved events and amenities enjoyed today, including Follow Me to Fuquay-Varina concerts, the Arts Center, and the signature slogan — A Dash More — did not yet exist. But some might say a turning point was nearing.

Susan Weis, a former marketing executive for Deloitte & Touche, lived in Willow Spring with her young family and took a part-time job with the Fuquay-Varina Downtown Association.

“I fell in love with Fuquay,” says Susan.

The town’s downtown revitalization was in its infancy, as downtown manager Susan brought marketing expertise and local know-how to the effort.

“We’ve come a long way,” she says.

During her years with the FVDA, Susan wrote the initial application for Fuquay-Varina to become a Main Street Community, a designation from the Department of Commerce that the town maintains today.

“It was a great job. … It gave me a lot of purpose and a lot of chances to have wins,” she says.