Stef Arck-Baynes. (Zac Hulayev.)
Stef Arck-Baynes has always enjoyed working in communications, but found her true calling in nonprofit communications. That career shift has led her to where she is today — running her own business, Achieving Good Communications.
“I said, ‘Well, if I really like volunteering and helping people this much, I should do it for a living.’ So I switched to the nonprofit world,” Arck-Baynes said. “I thought there are so many different missions that I want to support and so many people who need help. So that was one of the reasons I decided to go on my own.”
As any entrepreneur knows, setting off on your own is not an easy path. Arck-Baynes said she has always been someone with high anxiety but other aspects of her life helped her put things in perspective.
“Something about having a kid [makes] almost everything else seem low stress,” she said. “I felt, if it doesn’t work out, I can always go back to full-time work.”
Through an impressive network of contacts and lots of hard work, Arck-Baynes has built a business with a lasting imprint on the Philadelphia area. The Mount Airy resident said that one of her most rewarding experiences was working with Jewish Relief Agency a few years ago. Arck-Baynes helped create a video that was shown at the JRA gala, which featured testimonials by clients of the agency, Jewish and not. One client was the wife of a Holocaust survivor who had since died.
“The other client they connected me with was not Jewish, he was a single man with cancer raising his daughter … he had bills he was unable to pay, he had other needs, so I reached out to a reporter I know — and this wasn’t a part of the [JRA] engagement — but I felt like his story needed to be heard further and wider. I ended up connecting him with an Inquirer reporter who did a story on him. I know from past experience, the more that someone gets their story out, the more chance that it will help them,” Arck-Baynes said.
For Arck-Baynes, helping the Jewish community is as important as anything. She and her family celebrate holidays and are culturally Jewish. Arck-Baynes said her memories of her grandparents, who were religious, mean a lot to her, and she is proud to continue the legacy with her own family. Last winter, she had an enriching Jewish experience at her daughter’s school.
“Last year, I went to her school and we got her whole grade together, and we talked to them about the story of Chanukah. We taught them how to play dreidel … we’ve never been very religiously Jewish, it has been cultural, but I would never not celebrate Chanukah. It means a lot to me,” she said. “It reminds me of family, it reminds me of community, and so I brought that to her school last year, and she was really proud to help teach it with me, which I love to see.”
When Arck-Baynes remembers what her Jewish identity meant to her growing up, being the only Jewish student in her private school is a major part of it. She said it is important to her that her own daughter feels proud of her heritage and culture.
“I didn’t want her to go through that experience where she felt alone in it, where she felt envious of other people, where she felt left out,” Arck-Baynes said.
Arck-Baynes loves doing a job that makes a positive impact, she said. While there is so much negativity in the world, she chooses to be a force for good.
“There’s so many bad things happening in the world, and it’s so easy to go down that rabbit hole, whereas taking that energy and putting it toward positivity and saying, ‘I know that there are problems, but let me be the solution,’ is what I preach to my daughter,” Arck-Baynes said. “I try and practice that to be a good example to her.”
aguckes@midatlanticmedia.com