St. Louis alumni chapter of RIAS Berlin Commission launched with 3 intrepid alumni
Three RIAS Berlin Commission alumni in St. Louis got together recently to start a local chapter, following in the footsteps of chapters in New York, Washington DC, Texas/Oklahoma and Los Angeles. There are also chapters in Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg.
Rachel D. Lippmann of St. Louis Public Radio, who took part in the RIAS program in 2017, joined with her former colleague Ryan Delaney, who was on the program to Brussels and Germany in 2019, and Stephanie Carr, who was on the 2018 program to mark the occasion recently with a dinner at at a sandwich pub called The Gramophone in St. Louis’ The Grove neighborhood.
Rachel and Ryan had long worked together at St. Louis Public Radio while Stephanie recently moved from Nashville to St. Louis to work at station KSDK, an NBC affiliate for St. Louis. She had been working at a local station in Kansas City when she took part in the RIAS program.
“We know RIAS is big on building the alumni network but with it previously being just Rachel and me from the St. Louis area, we used to joke that we had an alumni meeting every day at work because we sat next to each other,” said Delaney. “Stephanie thought it’d be helpful to stand out to find each other… so she showed up in a Germany t-shirt! I hadn’t seen Rachel in person in over a year, so that was nice too. We chatted about the differences in our trips from the three years we did it (Stephanie was there during an election; Rachel got to go to Prague!). And we talked typical water cooler journalism talk… gossip about our respective outlets, what it was like working in Nashville during a busy year with the pandemic, a tornado and the Christmas bombing.”
The St. Louis chapter is open to any RIAS Berlin alumni or candidates for future programs. Write to info@darkseagreen-dog-940501.hostingersite.com for more information. There are no concrete plans yet for another meeting but the alumni group is considering going to see a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game.
