Tara St. Clair

As the shy, middle sister among two brothers growing up, Parkersburg, WV, native Tara St. Clair learned valuable leadership skills when she became a cheerleader at age seven.

“Cheerleading gave me the confidence to have a voice and the tools to work successfully in a team,” says St. Clair, now the program director of the Encova Center for Innovation and Entrepreneur­ship at the West Virginia University (WVU) John Chambers College of Business and Economics.

“From an early age, I understood hard work. My mom worked tirelessly to support our family. She led by example, never complaining. She always put everyone else’s needs ahead of her own,” she says.

In her current role, St. Clair loves helping WVU fulfill its mission of outreach and serving the state of West Virginia.

“I love creating programming and watching young people have a real impact on my home state,” she says.

For St. Clair, her biggest motivations are people and their stories.

“Watching a student grow through the process of the programming we provide and seeing actual learning happen is a beautiful thing,” she says. “You can see when the lightbulb goes off.”

Throughout her career, St. Clair has felt fortunate to work with many influential people. She has looked up to many strong women, including Liz Vitullo, Ph.D., Carrie White, Ph.D., and Lauren Prinzo.

“Liz, Carrie, and Lauren have been great examples of what strong women can do,” St. Clair says. “They are kind, brilliant and fierce. These are the type of women who are the first to volunteer to help and the last to take credit. I will forever be grateful for their mentorship and friendship throughout my career.”

A meeting with Bill Woodrum at Marshall University’s Robert C. Byrd Institute led to St. Clair’s greatest career successes—co-founding the West Virginia Entrepreneurship Ecosystem and Bridging Innovation Week.

“Bill told me about how he had been cultivating a group around the idea of entrepreneurship,” she says. “I told him I was working on something similar. We decided we would join forces and co-chair a statewide network.”

With that, the West Virginia Entrepreneurship Ecosystem was born.

Woodrum and St. Clair wanted to implement monthly meetings and plan an Entrepreneurship Ecosystem conference. They worked tirelessly for months to raise money and build a robust schedule of speakers with the goal of launching in April 2020. Due to COVID-19, they held the first official West Virginia Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Virtual Symposium series in November 2020. That first event taught Woodrum and St. Clair that they could make the event even bigger.

Enter Bridging Innovation—a weeklong series of events from across the state aimed at promoting and fostering entrepreneurship in West Virginia. A total of 1,000 people attended the 11 events during its inaugural week in April 2022. The events led to $120,000 in private investment going to 30 businesses.

Beginning at a young age, St. Clair recognized the importance of community service. In high school and college, she was involved with Relay for Life, an organization with a cause that’s near and dear to her heart as the daughter of a breast cancer survivor. After college, she became involved in Walk a Mile in Her Shoes, an event through the Rape and Domestic Violence Information Center.

Through it all, St. Clair chooses to live and work in West Virginia because of the sense of community, the grit and the sense of hope.

“There’s something special about the people here,” she says.