From behind the microphone and through the airwaves, Toni Reece has rapidly become a popular radio host and story teller featuring the people of Berks County through her new show Real Life with Toni Reece, a different kind of talk radio on WEEU. To say that Toni is simply a people person is an understatement. Her passion for people and their stories stretches deep into the recesses of her career, and has defined her throughout most of her life.
A Berks County native herself, Toni grew up in Mount Penn where she currently resides with her husband Jim. She attended the Mount Penn Schools and graduated from Mount Penn High School, later attending Kutztown University to pursue a degree in Special Education. She grew up in a musical family; her mother was a professional singer, and her father taught English at Oley High School and was an alto saxophone player.
“I grew up listening to Frank Sinatra and Nancy Wilson, and was asked to sing in a neighborhood band. I was so nervous and thought we had no business going out playing publicly but it was fun,” she remembers. “I did a little theatre, and if I could sing I would do it. I began to do dinner theatre at the Sheraton where they had a cabaret show with a director from New York. This worked well for me at that time because music was a big part of my life, but I was not brave enough to do theatre without the music.”
Toni soon married and had her first child, a son. “I felt it was time that I figured out what I really wanted to do. I went to work at Gilbert’s for several years and then on to Exide. While at Exide I worked up to Manager of Customer Quality. I am very process driven, and people focused. I was in my early twenties when I met a consultant who recommended that I start my own business. I worked with a small company with basic training and then went to a different company where I organized team building and workforce development. I started my own company called Baysix Training and partnered with organizations to do workforce development training. One of my clients, Kidsports, a franchise, required me to go to the UK to standardize their program. While I was over there, I was introduced to Investors in People. The Investors in People standard was used to access how well your company treated their workforce i.e. training, quality of work, fairness of practices. If your company passed the audit of this standard and received the crest of Investors in People, you were considered an employer of choice. I trained for two years in the UK to become the first practitioner in the US to be able to accredit companies here in the States. Prudential Securities in NY was to be the first company to be accredited. Two days after our initial meeting 9/11 happened and everything around Investors in People stopped. The funding dried up and I needed to pivot.”
Still working with the Kidsports franchise, Toni made connections which helped her focus in a different direction. “I was working in the Kidsports franchise and met people and partnered with them to form a People Academy in the UK. There was a People Academy UK and a People Academy US. We created tools and resources for businesses and personal development coaches and facilitators and workforce training consultants. We put the resources online and created the People Model that was sold to practitioners around the world. We closed the People Academy UK after 6 years when one of the partners immigrated to New Zealand”.
“I was working back here in the States when I met Craig Poole who had just arrived as the GM of the Crowne Plaza in Wyomissing. Craig like the idea of podcasting and offered me a room at the hotel to start. Room 204 became a podcasting and videocasting studio. I had an affinity to non-profits, and I was drawn to people. We helped countless non-profits tell their stories through The People Chronicles; community story telling giving a voice to those who didn’t have one. We did training and coached people to be brave enough to tell their stories. We marketed their stories and created a regular series, paying a stipend to have a regular story on the People Chronicles. It just worked! Craig left the building to move downtown to help with building a new hotel. Brian Kelly from Redesign Reading wanted me to consider moving to 505 Penn Street to get more people and traffic into the building. During the six years of doing the People Chronicles we told over 5,000 stories. With people telling their own stories, we did an immigrant series, a series about women, a seniors series, a veterans series and more, up until covid ended that era.”
By this time, Craig Poole had taken the helm at the newly constructed DoubleTree hotel in Reading, directly across from the Santander Arena. He contacted Toni and said, “Now it is time for you to work with me.” Toni recounts, “I started as a subcontractor, then went on to Vice President of Organizational Development and I started coaching leadership and staff. We started a podcast called Humanized Profit. Then Craig got sick and it changed everything.”
WEEU came under new ownership during this time and Toni’s name was put out there. “One thing led to another, and now I have this show,” she boils it down simply. “In the middle of all of this I received a diagnosis of a rare muscle disease called lipid storage disease, which is a very slow-moving progressive muscle disease with a future of losing mobility. It is an unknown journey, but I intend to fight the good fight. I feel that the world needs to hear the stories that are the heart of my show. Being diagnosed puts in perspective that work that I am doing every day.”
Real Life with Toni Reece has become an inspirational, informative and increasingly popular morning show airing from 10am to 12 noon weekdays on WEEU, 830 am. Toni is the perfect host with her relaxed approach and seasoned interview process bringing out the stories of Berks Countians from all areas of our unique culture. She continues to balance her life as a passionate people person, a wife, and a mother of two grown sons. Thank you, Toni, for sharing your passion for people and lifting up positivity within our homeplace of Berks!