Area VII Vice President (as of July 2023) Missy Groppel is the former spouse of a federal retiree from the U.S. Army Military District of Washington, and expected recipient of survivors benefits. She joined her local Harrisonburg Chapter of NARFE  in 2018, to support her father’s chapter membership as a retired research virologist from the National Institutes of Health. While not a federal retiree herself, Missy is a former employee of the United States Senate, so has empathy for our government’s hardworking employees and their battles with Congressional decisions and plans.

Besides newly-daunting responsibilities with the VFN, Missy continues to serve as her NARFE Chapter 164’s Board Secretary, and Membership Chair.

Missy is a former marketing and special events professional, having enjoyed a proud career in the museum world of Washington, D.C., for 28 years. The highlight of that career was 14 years at George Washington’s Mount Vernon departing as Director of Special Events. As well as having added resources development, advertising, public relations, membership and volunteer management, visitors studies, and tourism hospitality, to her skill set, Missy helped to initiate or execute a multitude of major and minor public, events and programs – all still on-going today – as well as executed private and corporate events, meetings, and conferences.   

In the 2000’s, Missy started her own museum visitor studies’ data collection business, under the direction of a statistics professor at George Mason University, and their clients included The International Spy Museum, the U.S. Postal Museum, and Mount Vernon. Missy also worked for Museum PR, a boutique marketing firm that performed the investigative research for a proposed national museum of the U.S. Army.  

Missy returned to full-time employment for several years managing the special events and marketing at Georgetown’s 1799 Federal-period Dumbarton House, headquarters of The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America.

In 2012, Missy departed DC to attend to the needs of aging relatives. For five years, Missy lived out of a suitcase between California, Utah, and North Carolina, working part-time at historic sites, wherever she found herself. In North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Missy worked as an interpreter at the 1925 Whalehead Club, an Art Nouveau hunting lodge, as well as a guide at the 1875 Currituck Beach Light Station, the northernmost lighthouse on the Outer Banks. Missy was also an 1860s costumed interpreter at This is the Place Heritage Park in Salt Lake City.

While Missy is formally retired, she continues to work full-time in the four season Massanutten Resort where she has lived since 2017.  She also hosts a private Airbnb guest suite in her home as a short-term rental business.

Also active in her local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter, Missy serves as a chair on the DAR Service to Veterans Committee.  Missy is also an active member of the DC Society of The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, and a member-at-large of The Daughters of Utah Pioneers.

Missy is an active member of her church, and serves as the president of her local congregation’s Relief Society, an organization that sustains the spiritual and temporal health of women and their families, and encourages the support of community needs through voluntarism.

Along with her volunteer obligations to the organizations above, Missy is pleased to support NARFE in her new role as the VFN Area VII representative.