If you ask Denise Starr what she does, she will tell you the title. Director of Member Relations at the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce. If you ask her what she actually does, the answer is shorter and more useful. She makes people feel known. The Chamber, the city, the room she walks into. Whoever needs that on a given day is who she is showing up for.
Who She Is
Denise Starr is the Director of Member Relations at the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce. She has been with the Chamber for eleven years. Before that she spent nine years at the Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee, which is where her career in Nashville really started. Her job at the Chamber is to keep 1,800-plus members happy. Companies that range from one or two person operations to organizations with thousands of employees. Different needs, different budgets, different definitions of success, all of them on her plate.
The Work
Day to day, the role looks like a lot of small things stacked on top of each other. Managing the membership database. Invoicing members. Activating new ones. Strategic planning with the team. Translating what members tell her into what the Chamber actually does about it. Underneath all of that, she calls it relationships. Most of the job is identifying what someone needs before they say it out loud, then making sure the right person inside the organization is on it. The administrative work she does is the visible part. The relational work she does is the part that has kept her in the role for over a decade.
How It Started
Denise was at the Girl Scouts of Middle Tennessee when a former colleague, a graphic designer who had moved to the Chamber, saw a Database Manager role open up and immediately thought of her. She was nine years deep at the Girl Scouts at that point. She interviewed from a place of stability rather than need. She liked the process. She liked the people. She accepted the offer. Eleven years later, the role has grown into Director of Member Relations, and the original instinct from a friend who knew her well still tracks.
What She Believes
People outside Nashville often still think of it as the country music city. Denise wants that record corrected. Music City is every genre now. The Chamber sees that reality every day in the businesses it represents, and she sees the breadth of the city in the room every time she works an event. The other thing she would push back on is the idea that members all need the same thing. They do not. A two-person operation and an organization of thousands are not solved by the same playbook. Most of her work is figuring out which playbook actually applies to who is in front of her.
Faith and Purpose
Denise does not separate her faith from her work. She believes love is the most important assignment she has been given, and she takes that seriously in the workplace. It does not show up as hugs or as saying the word out loud. It shows up as kindness. As courtesy. As consideration. As inclusivity. As making someone feel liked and respected on a regular Tuesday. She believes God has guided her through every step of her career, and she carries that quietly into how she treats the people around her.
What She Wants You to Know
The career section of her LinkedIn is incomplete on purpose. There is more to her than the job. She is a mom of three and a Nana to three more, and her family is the part of her life she counts as the actual success. She is honored to be a caregiver to her special needs son. She is private in a public-facing role, a homebody in a city built on going out. She is a trained holistic life coach who does not charge for it because she wants to support people through their lives, not bill them. She loves music, animals, antiquing, and muscle cars. She bought herself a Dodge Challenger for her 50th birthday. She is an identical twin. None of that is on the bio, and most of it tells you more about who she is than the title does.
What Is Next
Denise will be 61 in May. She is honest about where she is on the timeline. The next three years are about preparation. She wants to share what she has learned over eleven years with the team coming up behind her, so that when she steps away in the next five or six years the transition is clean. She is also paying attention to something outside her department. AI scares a lot of the people she serves, and she does not want fear to be the dominant feeling her members carry into the next few years. If she can help take some of that off the table, even informally, she is going to try.
Denise Starr has built a career on the idea that people remember how you made them feel more than what you sent them. After eleven years and over 1,800 members, the evidence is on her side.
Connect With Denise Starr
Denise Starr is the Director of Member Relations at the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce in Nashville, TN. Find her on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/denise-hoolhorst-starr-255b66b6 or visit the Chamber at nashvillechamber.com.