Staff
Ryan Keiffer
Executive Director
After graduating from Colorado State University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English, Ryan spent over two years in Europe working in cross-cultural communications, education and training, and project management. He helped his wife, Gretchen Gaede, start The Write Words in 1998, and led the re-branding of the company into A-Train Marketing Communications, Inc., a comprehensive marketing firm with a specialized focus on serving non-profit organizations and companies that share A-Train’s commitment to driving the greater good. In addition to being co-owner of A-Train Marketing, Ryan is also a co-owner of Emerge Colorado, a young professionals networking club.
Ryan dedicates a great deal of time to the community as the Board President of the Fort Collins Housing Corporation, Board member of the Cultural Resource Board, Coordinating Committee member for UniverCity Connections, and several additional donations of time, energy and financial support to numerous local charitable and community development causes. Ryan is also the former Board President for Bas Bleu Theatre Company and former Board member for the Downtown Development Authority, Arts Alive Fort Collins and the Northern Colorado Multicultural Corporation. Ryan was named Rising Business Star by the Fort Collins Coloradoan in 2007, and was nominated by the Northern Colorado Business Report for Entrepreneur of the Year each year from 2004 through 2009, and was a finalist for the award in 2009.
Beth Flowers
Senior Producer/Project Director
Beth has nearly twenty years of executive level experience with non-profits, governmental agencies, and broadcast media. She is a visionary thinker and a talented communicator with a proven track record of success. She created messaging for victorious political candidates and issues, inspired citizen participation that actually passed new laws and designed campaigns that changed public perceptions about controversial issues. Beth has also raised millions of dollars for organizations and causes she believes in.
Beth was the Executive Director of Missourians for Choice, a women’s issues PAC, from 1993 to 1997. Beth left electoral politics to become the Project Director for Downtown Development for the St. Louis Development Corporation, the economic development arm of the City of St. Louis. In 2002 Beth moved to Colorado to write a novel. In 2004, Beth was lured back to non-profit management and was hired as the Station Manager for KRFC, the Fort Collins non-profit community radio station. In 2007 Beth left KRFC to work with her husband at Eloquent Cow, their audio production studio.
Beth is a voracious reader, film buff, self- taught gourmet cook, landscape designer, certified Colorado native plant master, and amateur photographer. She had ten years of classical piano training and played in the Montreaux Jazz Festival with the University City High School Jazz Band in 1983. Beth is still working on a multi-generational novel about Midwestern women musicians and strives to understand string theory.
Kari Munson
Producer
Kari was born and raised in Minneapolis, MN. Arts and culture has been an important part of her life, as the daughter of a music teacher. Starting in second grade, Kari was a member of a semi-professional girls’ choir, Bel Canto Voices, and had the opportunity to travel nationally and internationally singing for a variety of audiences. As part of the choir she had the distinct honor to sing for the King and Queen of Sweden and with John Denver and the Minnesota Opera Company.
Kari earned her Bachelor of Arts in Musical Theatre from the University of Northern Colorado. After college she started her arts career as a freelance director and choreographer for several schools in the Minneapolis area, discovering a passion for arts education. Kari also returned to Bel Canto Voices as the Administrative Director and led the choir on tours nationally and also through Spain and Gibraltar. Within her freelance and educational career, Kari wrote study guides for a public access music program, Music de Camera. The guides focused on music history, theory and collaborative arts projects for each musical program. The study guides were distributed regionally and used in several school districts as part of the music curriculum.
Kari returned to Colorado in 2006, settling in Fort Collins and eventually discovering an opportunity to work with Beet Street. She is excited to continue her work with the arts and culture community in Fort Collins developing partnerships and civic pride with each new program. Kari is privileged to work at Beet Street while fulfilling the core passions of her career and life; arts, culture, and education.
Lindsey Heckel
Marketing Coordinator
Coming Soon!
Kerry Miller
Office Manager/Production Assistant
For the past twenty years, Kerry has worked for small non-profit and entrepreneurial businesses. She recently relocated to Fort Collins from Missoula, Montana, where she was employed by the University of Montana Foundation. She also worked as the Outreach, Education, and Volunteer Coordinator for the International Wildlife Film Festival and Media Center.
Kerry is a volunteer Master Naturalist for the City of Fort Collins and sits on the Executive Committee for the Colorado Sierra Club. She has served on the Board of Footloose Montana and the Sterling Forest Partnership. As the Conservation Chair for the Northern New Jersey Chapter of the Sierra Club, Kerry lead a campaign with a small group of volunteers to protect watershed land that provides drinking water to 2,000,000 people. This grassroots campaign raised $8,000,000 through contributions from the federal government, the states of New York and New Jersey, and a private foundation to help create this environmental legacy, one of Sierra Club’s most successful grassroots campaigns.
Kerry is a writer and recently completed her first book, “All Things Natural: A Collection of Poems from the Mountains to the Plains.” She is in the process of completing two childrens' books.
Kathy Cardona
Finance Manager
