This year’s list of five Women of Strength, selected from a wide swath of tremendous reader nominations, is far from an exhaustive list of the incredible women who populate the Susquehanna Valley. However, they deeply exemplify what a strong woman can look like in her many forms.
When these women were asked what being a woman of strength means to them, one throughline shone through: They all believe that kindness, compassion and love are not mutually exclusive of power and tenacity—showing just how unique a concoction womanhood is.
Get your tissues ready, and prepare to cheer on your sisters. We are beyond proud to introduce you to this year’s five exceptional Women of Strength.
Photography By Karlo Gesner
Leigh Lindsay
An iconic emblem of STRENGTH
If you’re a Lancaster local, you know Zoetropolis—part independent cinema and event space, part restaurant and distillery. The woman behind the business— among other noteworthy ventures —is Leigh Lindsay, who admits, “I’m a little bit fearless, and I never learned my lesson, and I'm not afraid to take risks.” Part of that, she says, is rooted in being an Aries (symbolized by a ram’s head), but it also has to do with her life experiences.
Lindsay lost her mother more than two decades ago, which fundamentally changed her. She also watched her close friend, who was a mother to little kids, pass away. What she took from these moments, and losses, was this: “Ultimately, we don’t know how much time we have on this Earth, so it's best not to waste.”
Lindsay first launched Zoetropolis in the mid 1990s and reopened it as a reimagined space in 2014. A handful of years later in 2019, it moved to Water Street, where it lives today. Lindsay’s business partner, Cheila Huettner, has been a part of Zoetropolis for a large part of its journey. Huettner was also the one who nominated Lindsay, although Lindsay says, “I feel like I should have written this for her.” Huettner, however, says about Lindsay, “She cares for the business as if it’s one of her children, and the staff that work for her are treated as family.”
As if one iconic business isn’t enough, Linday also owns Salon Fin, a beauty salon that has been around for nearly two decades and provides another outlet for her to let out her innate creativity (while also giving killer haircuts). She did all of this while raising five kids, and when she looks back on when they were all young, she thinks, “That was intense.” But as she gets older, she’s bogged down less by imposter syndrome and uplifted more by the feeling of letting insecurities go.
"She did all of this while raising five kids, and when she looks back on when they were all young, she thinks, ‘That was intense.’"
Despite loss, despite struggle, Lindsay has maintained an uncompromisingly green outlook. “I ideally would love everyone on this planet to stop laying on their horn and screaming at people, and writing really horrible things on the internet,” she says. But, she admits, “Genuinely, in my heart, I feel like everyone has a good part of them to the core.”
More recently, Lindsay has learned how to stop and look around her, something she’s had trouble with in the past. One thing that has helped is yoga. She got certified to teach yoga at the Willow Yoga Studio in Willow Street and also meditates with the help of online resources from philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris. “There are things that I can control, and there’s things that I can’t control,” she says. Coming to that conclusion, Lindsay adds about her journey through her life, adulthood, family and relationships, and career, “It’s been quite a ride.”
Photography By Karlo Gesner
Penny Snyder
Called to be a BEACON OF LIGHT
A true staple in her community, Penny Snyder has dedicated her life to serving others. “I feel called to do it by God,” she says. That feeling may have started when she was young and witnessed the aftermath of a barn fire on a neighbor’s farm.
“That was his livelihood,” she says. “Everybody in the community pulled together to help clean up his barn and rebuild it. They pulled together to help him through it.” After the new barn was constructed, Snyder remembers the community celebrating with a barn dance. “I remember thinking that I’m part of an awesome community that has everybody's back,” she says.
Today, Snyder organizes her community’s Vacation Bible School every year even when her own kids have outgrown it. She has a produce stand and gives vouchers to those less fortunate in her community. She’s been known to bake thousands of cookies and cinnamon rolls to help raise money for troubled families, and she organizes and runs monthly line dances at a local church each winter so kids in the community have something to keep them busy.
Last winter, at the Collinsville Drive-In in Brogue, an owner fell ill and Snyder stepped up to help get the restaurant open for their 2024 season. She makes sure to spend time with the local senior citizens. The list, it seems, goes on.
I always felt like that's just how I was wired,” Snyder says. “So many people focus on the negative today.
"So many people focus on the negative today. I always try to help them to see that there's positive."
I always try to help them to see that there's positive.” If she can make people smile, if she can give them hope, she will.
Snyder knows that she is able to look around the community and fill gaps in need because her husband makes the sacrifice of driving to Balti-more every day for work. “He gave me the opportunity to be me, and follow where I feel like I'm called to go and help people,” she says.
She also has an inkling where her energy comes from. “Everybody blames it on my dad,” she says. “He goes, goes, goes and never stops, but that's what makes him happy, and that's how I feel.” And what she does makes her more than happy.
To Snyder, associating herself with a cohort of strong women doesn’t make sense at first glance. She’s humble to the core and knows the source of it all is a force far beyond her. After receiving notice she was nominated and ultimately won a spot in the list, she says, “My husband is the one who told me, ‘There's different ways to look at strength, and there are people in our community that evidently see you as a strength.’”
To that, Snyder says, “I guess there are all different kinds of strengths.” She is certainly right.
Photography By Karlo Gesner
Ash Jones
GIVING HER ALL, literally
In February, Ash Jones went through an eight-hour procedure, but it wasn’t for her own health. It was all for a complete stranger. She donated bone marrow to a woman in her late 50s with a rare case of leukemia, giving her a second chance at life. “It was a remarkable thing to be able to do,” Jones says. Despite having every opportunity to back out of the procedure after being notified she was a match for someone in need, she kept trucking all the way through.
Jones is the owner of Thrive Fit Co, a boutique fitness studio located in Camp Hill, where she helps people of all stripes build strength, move well and adventure through life—and she takes the adventure part seriously. Just recently, she accompanied a client up a 5.5-mile hike in the Rocky Mountains. A year prior, that same client, in her late 60s, was working toward her first squat. Needless to say, she has come a long way.
“All the awards are really great, but the things that I get a lot of excitement out of are all the milestones, all the accomplishments that the people I get to work with have,” Jones says. The accomplishments of others rub off on her and give her even more motivation to keep pushing in her own life.
Between her work and her bone marrow donation, Jones’ penchant for building up others is clear. While the process of bone marrow donation is anonymous, she gets to meet the recipient of her bone marrow one year after the procedure. Amid the pain and discomfort of preparing for, going through and healing from the procedure, Jones says, “What she’s fighting is way more than what I’ve ever fought.” This is all despite the heartbreaking deaths of two family members that Jones dealt with prior to the procedure—which, to her, made the process even more meaningful.
“They’re not defined by the things that they’ve gone through, but rather how they overcome them.”
Both Jones and her business have gone through changes over the years. What started out as pop-up fitness classes with materials stored in her car has become a fully fledged business with a place to call its own. After multiple floods at her rented studio, she recently purchased a building where her equipment can live and her clients can, as the business name suggests, thrive.
“Change is always scary for people,” she says, but she’s hopeful that Thrive will have an even bigger impact in the community in its new place.
Jones is also a member of the Downtown Camp Hill Association and has facilitated more than $15,000 in donations through her business to organizations like The Earl Besch Fund and Coats for Kids. She has organized fitness festivals over the years, encouraging her community to embrace an active lifestyle.
Tearing up thinking about the recipient of her bone marrow, Jones is an emblem of giving, quite literally, all you have. As a woman of strength inside and outside of the gym, she says empowerment and compassion are two of her biggest strengths (and despite popular belief, those two qualities are not mutually exclusive). “They’re not defined by the things that they’ve gone through, but rather how they overcome them,” she says. “I’m trying to balance personal, professional and community commitments while still maintaining my integrity and grace.”
Photography By Karlo Gesner
Santina Huerta
SELF-CARE isn’t selfish
Walking past Embodyment Wellness on Lancaster’s Columbia Avenue during one of their Zumba dance classes, even passersby can feel the energy coming from within. Much of that energy stems from owner Santina Huerta, who facilitates the no-judgment zone with pizzazz.
Huerta’s knack for creating a special place with purpose doesn’t come out of thin air. “I didn’t have a community growing up,” she says. “I wanted that, so I realized I have to create it.”
Huerta’s studio puts on high-energy classes like bachata and salsa dance as well as soothing sessions like gentle vinyasa yoga and meditation. She used dance and wellness to get through hard times in her life, and bringing that to others has been a key focus in her career. Perhaps the biggest turning point in bringing her dreams to fruition has been her kids.
As a single parent with two daughters, Huerta knew she didn’t want them to have to go through the same dark times or traumatic events as she did. Rather, she wanted them to build the resiliency to be able to focus on themselves. “I realized, to do better for them, I had to do better for myself,” she says. “That’s really where the journey started to gain momentum.”
Embodyment is not your average studio. Huerta donates her time and expertise to others through events like Bachata at Binns (a free-to-the-public dance class at Lancaster’s Binns Park during the warmer months). She also puts on nonprofit fundraising events like EmbodyHER Women’s Wellness Retreat and Dancing with the Lancaster Stars, which benefit the Milagro House women’s shelter and Domestic Violence Services of Lancaster County, respectively. As a domestic abuse survivor herself, these causes are close to home.
“I used those services at one point in my life when I thought it was dark and there was no way out into the light,” Huerta says. “I didn’t have anybody supporting me. To be at a place now to be mentally and holistically sound, I want to give back to these organizations that helped me tremendously when I really didn’t know what to do.”
She’s also passionate about working with kids. Through volunteering at the YMCA, Bright Horizons and other organizations that put on youth programming, she feels she’s able to expose young folks to wellness habits at an age when it's most pivotal for them to navigate life.
To Huerta, true strength isn’t about the physical side of things. To her, strong women are the ones who are able to mentally and emotionally work on themselves while being a pillar for themselves, their family and friends and their larger community. She’s a major advocate for self-care, because, as she says, if she doesn’t pour into herself, she can’t pour into her kids and others she cares about. In this sense, Huerta says, “Being selfish is a positive thing.”
Photography By Karlo Gesner
Beth Christian
FIERCE and KIND to the Core
After working her way up from a clerical employee to an executive over the course of her career, Beth Christian has a feeling she knows what got her there.
She says it’s being fierce, brave, loving and even a little bit awkward, with a healthy dose of rebellion. In other words, it’s being totally herself. “I want to be seen as a fierce leader, a class act who takes calculated risks to get stuff done while keeping the employee experience top of mind,” Christian says.
In addition to her career, Christian is a mom, grandmother, wife and pet caretaker. Plus, now that her kids (whom she raised as a single mother) are grown, she has made a conscious commitment to filling her cup through volunteerism. For example, she volunteers as a NICU cuddler at UPMC MageeWomens Hospital and as a website administrator with the lost-pet platform Find Toby in PA. She also recently volunteered to become a speaker for the Resilient Voices program in Pennsylvania’s Office of Victim Advocate to share her personal experience as a survivor.
At age 24, Christian was attacked and nearly killed by a stranger. “The trajectory of my whole life changed,” she says. “I share most of my stuff because it makes other people more comfortable to talk about theirs.”
More recently, in 2018, Christian was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. After some initial grief, she feels thankful that it was caught early and she feels healthy. Now, she’s turned her energy toward becoming a relentless advocate to find a cure for the disease as an MS board member and an MS Ambassador through The National MS Society.
Christian recognizes that her turning points in life aren’t the most positive stories, but they’re hers nonetheless. And they’re why she wants to give back. “My mantra is ‘Always have a foot forward,’ because I like to get stuff done, but always keeping that hand back,” she says. “I try really hard to bring people along with me.” Even at work, she tries to lead with love, saying, “I think if we lead with our heart, it’s a much better environment.”
Christian mentors employees both informally and professionally and donates her time to even more organizations, sitting on the Planned Parenthood Keystone Board and the STEM-UP Network Advisory Board, and participating in the Women in Leadership and the Society for Human Resource Management's mentorship programs and—you guessed it—others.
“I’m a little bit of a square peg, but I’ve developed lots of good relationships over the years, and people who have appreciated my little bit of weird,” Christian says.
“Women, still in 2024, have to face challenges that men don’t, and that’s just the truth,” she adds. “I think that our strength comes from a different place. Our strength comes from our hearts. Our strength comes from our empathy.”
Everything Christian does is something she’s passionate about, and she’s passionate about a lot—and we’re all better for it.
