As a college student, Erin Frye Provencher tried to reconcile her inveterate optimism with the dawning realization that life can be quite cruel.

“At JMU I asked one of my professors, ‘What is the point of doing anything when everything is so huge? How can any form of giving ever be enough?’” says Provencher. “She told me, ‘All you can do is everything you can in your corner of the world.’”

Provencher took that wisdom to heart and has since carved out myriad meaningful corners in her world. In 2020, while serving as director of outreach at CultureWorks, Provencher—along with a cadre of other local arts advocates and organizations—raised more than $200,000 in grant money for local artists to survive during the pandemic. CultureWorks received the 2021 National Philanthropy Day Crisis Response Award for this work.

Now the lead story marketer at Richmond Grid, Provencher dutifully shares the stories of fellow Richmonders through the Here Weekly newsletter, which features passionate and talented guest editors and the events they think the community should show up for each week.

The Humble Haven-trained yoga teacher and lifelong musician is also behind a new Richmond Grid initiative which will bring wellness experiences—including yoga, music and meditation—into corporate settings around the city. “We want to help people become vulnerable in a place that tends to be guarded,” says Provencher.

The Richmond native has helped people the world over become vulnerable, traveling with her guitar from the gardens at Lewis Ginter to a refugee camp in Greece to assisting with the live art program at inclusive performing arts school, SPARC. “Music is the greatest connector,” says Provencher. “It will just break down a barrier…you don’t have to speak the same language, in fact you can be of all diverse abilities.”

Provencher has used her uncanny knack for dismantling barriers to broach complex topics in the community, including acting as the lead media and public relations liaison for interactive, multimedia exhibit Race in Richmond. She says the exhibit, which launched in November 2023 and was on display through summer 2024, allowed people in Richmond to “think about race and what our individual experiences have been, and then what that looks like collectively.”