Skip to content
‘Wild Women’ raise $23,000 for good causes in the Tennessee town.
Nancy Kavanaugh moved to tiny Jonesborough, Tennessee, in 2000 after retiring from corporate life in Atlanta.
She had come to Jonesborough’s National Storytelling Festival since the 1980s and was overjoyed to find a post-retirement gig as director of the National Storytelling Network.
Increasingly, too, she networked with Jonesborough residents.
Today, she says, “I’m a little old lady in a little old town with a little old cat, living in a little old house.”
Yet she’s also a member of the “Wild Women of Jonesborough”—what Kavanaugh calls “a disorganized, unorganized group” that formed in 2019 to raise money to stage a play called “Wild Women of Winedale” at the Jonesborough Repertory Theatre.
“We have a great group of women here in Jonesborough,” says Kavanaugh. “And I found people really wanted to support community activities. And a lot of people donating a small amount of money can make a big pile of gold.”
Kavanaugh’s group raised $4,000 for the theater plus $5,000 more for local children to take a shopping trip to nearby Johnson City, Tennessee.
In total, this group of 85 ladies has raised $23,000 for Jonesborough events that have also included supporting the town’s storytelling tradition.
“I was also finding people saying, ‘I want to be a wild woman,’” Kavanaugh says with a laugh. “And what I’m finding are different people have different interests. But it’s all tied to community. We also sent out Valentine’s cards to nursing homes. It’s not all about money; it’s about serving others.”
The story above first appeared in our July/August 2021 issue.
