We recently connected with Amanda Clark and have shared our conversation below.
Amanda, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.
It used to be the only way to learn more about St. Louis was through trolley tours and ghost tours. While those tours have their place and people love them, I wanted to create something more relevant to today’s experiential travelers.
St. Louis has a rich and complex history, we’re a city that is still grappling with the consequences of late-20th century social and economic changes. See STL tours are the only ones that work to make the experience of learning St. Louis history a blend of entertaining and enlightening. We aren’t afraid to acknowledge things like racial divides and their causes, while also celebrating the beautiful built environment we are surrounded by.
Amanda, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’m a St. Louis transplant from Tennessee, with a background in architectural history, PR, & marketing. In 2012 I created Renegade STL to find my own voice within the St. Louis tour scene. A few years later, I was asked to give my first bus tour. It was for a group looking to learn more about St. Louis history and current development projects taking place. The overwhelmingly positive response to that helped Renegade start to really grow. We created tours with fun names like “The Whole Damn City” and “Badass Babes” that looked at St. Louis’ historic neighborhoods that are off the beaten path. We introduced attendees to new stories and made them relevant to new audiences. In 2019, a feature in the New York Times led to very quick growth and I was able to leave my full-time job to help grow Renegade. None of this was done alone, I was lucky to have partners who believed in our mission and brought their own strengths and energy to the project. We had a blast being super-creative with tours and talks and engaging so many groups that normally wouldn’t go on a history tour.
One of my proudest private tours was when we were approached to secretly create a tour for a woman’s 91st birthday. When the day of the tour arrived, she was so moved as we headed off on a tour of her life, with a bus full of family members that had never been to any of the sites we were visiting. We also did bus tours for wedding weekends, visiting sites that were important to the couple’s story in St. Louis. Being able to help make these personal connections was pretty dreamy.
Around this same time, the Missouri Historical Society (MHS) and I began talking about how I could bring the tours to a new program they were creating. As someone who had always dreamed of working in a museum, this was too great of an idea to pass up, even if it meant leaving Renegade and the freedom it gave behind. I joined the Missouri Historical Society team in 2020 as the organization’s Community Tours Manager. In this role, working with the MHS team, we launched the See STL tour program. The Missouri Historical Society has been a wonderful place and my entrepreneurial spirit is welcomed and encouraged…it’s been the best of both worlds.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
When I was creating my own business and now as I manage See STL tours for the Missouri Historical Society, my goal has been to change the narrative about St. Louis history. For so long it has been driven by nostalgic history with very little diversity of story or narrators. We are changing that with more community representation and partnership as well as training on how to make each tour relevant and meaningful to the group attending.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I attribute my success to saying yes so many times to things that were way out of my comfort zone and that took a lot of courage. By saying yes to so many random projects, it really helped me be stronger at what I do and it helped me to see how people reacted to different things. Now that I’m very established, it is a challenge to start to say no when something doesn’t fit the vision of our program.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://mohistory.org/learn/
see-stl - Instagram: @mohistorymuseum