PROFILE
By Glenda Graves | Portrait photo by Keith Branch
Allyson de la Houssaye
More Than the Ride
Allyson de la Houssaye didn’t set out to build a movement; she was just looking for community. By the time she found herself clipping into a bike in Northwest Arkansas, her life looked very different than it once had.
She had built a career in Chicago working for networks such as National Geographic, The History Channel, The Weather Channel and NBC Sports. But in 2013, she made a move to Bentonville, prompted by her husband’s job. She was a new mother in a new place, navigating life with a six-week-old baby and a shifting sense of identity. “I was a mom. I was a wife,” Allyson said. “That’s how I was known in the schools and in the community.”
What she didn’t expect was that a simple decision to buy a bike would not only reshape her life but help spark one of the most influential grassroots movements in Northwest Arkansas. “I just wanted to ride and find community,” she said. “It started out as a selfish thing.”
Like many women, Allyson found herself at a crossroads after stepping away from her career to raise her children. She had her second baby in 2015, and with that came a growing sense that she was ready for something more, though she wasn’t quite sure what that looked like yet.
“I had taken seven years out of the workforce,” Allyson said. “At one point, I didn’t even know how to do a Google spreadsheet.”
But what she did know was how to connect with people. She started riding with a small group of women — just casual, social bike rides that gradually grew. What began as a handful of riders quickly expanded as more women showed up, curious but unsure of where to start. “Women didn’t really know how to get into it,” Allyson said, “but they wanted to be involved.”
The rides became more than just exercise; they became a space. “For me, it was where I found my community,” Allyson said. “It was a physical challenge but also a social one. I’m not a cyclist; I’m a bike rider because it’s social.”
That distinction would go on to shape everything that followed. As the group grew, so did the need for structure. “There was a point where we realized consistency was going to be really important,” Allyson said. “We needed leadership. We needed a schedule. We needed a mission.”
What had started organically began to take shape as something more intentional. A group of co-founders stepped in to formalize the effort, creating bylaws, defining a purpose and ultimately establishing what would become Women of OZ.
Even then, Allyson wasn’t entirely sure she belonged in a leadership role. “I had impostor syndrome,” she said. “I wasn’t a great mountain biker. I thought I’d be lucky just to be involved.”
But she kept showing up. She kept saying yes. “And that creates the next opportunity,” she said.
That mindset helped transform Women of OZ into what it is today, the largest mountain biking nonprofit of its kind in North America, with hundreds of certified ride leaders and dozens of trained coaches.
At its core, the organization was never just about biking. It was about removing the barriers that kept women from even trying. “There are three big ones,” Allyson said. “Intimidation, education and equipment.”
Each one was addressed directly. The organization created a welcoming environment to combat intimidation, offered clinics and coaching to provide education and built relationships with local bike shops to make equipment more accessible.
“We took those barriers one by one and built our mission around solving them,” she said. For the women who become involved, the impact reaches far beyond the trail. “Connection — that’s the biggest thing it creates.”
But it goes deeper than that.
“It creates a space that’s just for you,” she said. “For a lot of women, especially after becoming a mom, you lose that. This gives something back.”
That “something” often looks different for each woman — maybe it’s confidence, independence or leadership, but the pattern is familiar. “You do something hard, something scary,” Allyson said, “and then you turn around and help someone else do it.”
It’s a cycle she believes is essential to both personal growth and long-term happiness. “When you look at what actually makes people happy, it’s community and purpose that’s bigger than you,” she said.
As Bentonville has grown into a globally recognized cycling destination, Women of OZ has played a critical role in shaping who gets to be part of that growth. “It’s been hugely impactful,” Allyson said. “I don’t know what it would look like without Women of OZ.”
Allyson de la Houssaye (second from left) is joined by the USA Olympic team to coach local Women of OZ participants at the organization's RISE event (Photo by Kate Austin Photography)
Northwest Arkansas now sees significantly higher participation from women in cycling than most places in the country. “People come here and say they’ve never seen this many women riding,” she said.
Women of OZ has become what Allyson describes as a feeder organization, a starting point that helps women enter the sport and then expand into other areas of the cycling community and industry.
The ripple effects are visible in the women who have come through the program. Some have launched businesses. Others have stepped into leadership roles in major organizations. Many have taken what they learned and built something new.
“We’ve had women move away and start their own groups in other cities,” Allyson said. “We share our playbook. We want to help others build something similar.”
Still, the focus remains close to home. “We’re passionate about women in our area,” she said. “That’s where we want to make the biggest impact.”
Beyond her work with Women of OZ, Allyson’s involvement in outdoor recreation and community development stretches across the region and the state. She currently serves on the Bentonville Parks and Recreation Board, where she has spent the last year and a half as chair. She is also the chair commissioner for the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council and serves as a state commissioner with the Keep Arkansas Beautiful Commission, helping connect conservation, preservation and recreation efforts across Arkansas.
Rather than seeing those roles as separate commitments, Allyson views them as pieces of the same mission. She describes Women of OZ as the “soft infrastructure” — the people, programming and community activation that bring individuals together outdoors. Her work with parks and recreation focuses on the “hard infrastructure” — the trails, parks and gathering spaces where those connections happen. At the state level, her preservation and conservation work helps secure funding and protect the natural places that make outdoor recreation possible in the first place.
In many ways, Allyson’s own path has come full circle. After years away from her professional roots, she has returned to storytelling, this time with a deeper sense of purpose. She founded AWAL Productions with the intention of bringing people’s stories to life. She recently completed a 47-minute documentary following a group of friends experiencing the history of Arkansas while traveling 470 miles across the state by bicycle. And she is working on another short focused on how to build a “mega campus” for a Fortune 1 company, which is set to premier this summer at Bentonville Film Festival.
“I felt a calling to go back to storytelling,” she said. Her work now blends everything she’s experienced.
For all that Women of OZ has created for others, Allyson is quick to acknowledge what it’s given her in return. “It gave me a place to grow,” she said.
It gave her a way back into leadership, a way to reconnect with her skills, a way to rediscover herself outside of the roles she had stepped into as a wife and mother.
But more than anything, it gave her something she wasn’t actively looking for at the time. “It gave me community,” she said.
She didn’t set out to build something this impactful. It grew, ride by ride, conversation by conversation, connection by connection. And it all started with something simple: showing up, getting on a bike, saying yes.
“Every time you say yes,” she said, “it opens the door to the next thing.”