Heartland Chapter

There's something sport does that almost nothing else can. Not any particular team, not any single season, but sport itself, as a kind of shared human practice. The way it creates identity out of thin air. A couple colors, a name, and a ritual repeated across generations.... and suddenly a group of strangers has something in common that feels anything but arbitrary. It feels, somehow, innately kindred. And maybe that’s why it’s been on my mind lately—because in a time when so

Last Thursday, our chapter hosted our inaugural Retail Talk —and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Going into the final week of planning the conversation, I still wasn’t entirely sure what it was going to be. I'd just gotten back home from a fun but chaotic trip to Seattle, was more depleted than I wanted to admit, and found myself in a familiar place a few hours before we went live: staring blankly at my screen, questioning if I actually had anything worthwhile to say.

What a Saturday grocery run taught me about one of the most consequential design problems in America This past Saturday I went grocery shopping. That's not a very dramatic opening sentence, I know… but stay with me. I live on Kansas City's East Side, in a neighborhood I have genuinely grown to love, but also a part of the city that qualifies as a food desert. Our closest grocery store (that isn't a Family Dollar or a gas station ) is a Whole Foods about a mile and a half away

The Heartland Chapter board makes its way through the crowd at Westport Social to secure our group a stellar spot to spread out and connect during our Member Appreciation Happy Hour on February 19th, 2026. On a lively Thursday evening at Westport Social in St. Louis, the Heartland Chapter gathered for our first in-person event of the year: our February General Membership Happy Hour, sponsored by our good friends at VizEx . Westport Social itself was buzzing... lively music pu