Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce and its Women’s Council affiliate presented its 38th annual ATHENA Award to Julie Chapus, founder and director of Miss Julie’s School of Beauty, at an awards ceremony on Thursday, Feb. 1st.
The ATHENA Award is given annually to a professional female leader who has demonstrated significant achievements in business, community service and the professional advancement of women.
Chapus is the founder and director of Miss Julie’s School of Beauty, a nonprofit cosmetology school, empowering survivors of human trafficking through vocational training.
She saw a need for survivors to have a stable and lucrative income through state licensure. She has taken her knowledge from the social work field and blended it with her training in cosmetology to create an in-depth class for a variety of professionals covering what trafficking is, what it looks like in our area and what we can do about it.
Prior to her work on Miss Julie’s School of Beauty, Chapus worked in the Rochester Psychiatric Center, Park Ridge Chemical Dependency Unit and Westfall Associates as the Dual Diagnostic Therapist treating chemically dependent and mental health diagnoses.
