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Paulina Roe | The Mami Collective: Building a Community Where Ambitious Moms Don't Have to Choose


Paulina Roe, Founder The Mami Collective


You're Still That Girl

Paulina Roe was nine months pregnant when a friend told her something that stuck.

I wish I was as selfish as you.


It wasn't meant as a compliment. The friend apologized. But Paulina took it anyway — turned it over, held it up to the light, and decided it was exactly the philosophy she was going to take into motherhood.


Two years later, she is a working radio personality, a podcast host, a founder, a writer, a mom of one, and the woman behind the Mami Collective — a community-driven platform for ambitious moms that has grown from casual brunches to dinner series, annual summits, business grants, and media opportunities that have landed its members in Forbes, Business Insider, Yahoo, and WGN.

She will tell you, without hesitation, that her so-called selfishness is why all of it works.


The Girl Who Always Knew

Paulina grew up on the southwest side of Chicago — close enough to Midway Airport to throw a rock at it, as she puts it. And she always knew, in some vague but insistent way, that she was going to be on a microphone.


In eighth grade she did a career day performance as a talk show host. At home, she recorded herself over cassette tapes just to hear her own voice. In high school, she did morning TV. At UIC, she wrote blogs for the campus radio station and ended up becoming program director by her senior year.


She interned at B96 — now her competitor. She moved to LA for a year and a half, drove a van for I Heart Radio, nannied on the side, learned everything she could. She came back to Chicago. She got on air. She has been at the Fred Show for nearly a decade. She is now syndicated.

Radio, she says, is her tree. Everything else is the branches.


The Podcast She Couldn't Find

In 2018, Paulina was taking the train from downtown Chicago back to Midway — in her hustle era, new in radio, millennial through and through — and she went looking for a podcast that spoke to her.


She couldn't find it. So she made one.


Untitled — named in response to the "entitled millennial" narrative she had never related to — ran for nearly four years. She had Jack Daniels as a sponsor. She had a Love Is Blind cast member in the studio. She was doing something that felt completely natural before it was everywhere.

Then COVID came. Life accelerated. She got into a serious relationship, got engaged, got married. The podcast went on hiatus. And then she got pregnant — and everything became clear again.


The Fear of Losing Yourself

Paulina is honest about something most new moms don't say out loud: she was nervous about becoming a mom. Not about the baby. About herself.


The moms she had watched before her — people she loved, people who were genuinely happy — sometimes seemed to have disappeared a little into motherhood. The identity, the ambition, the individuality she admired in them before kids had been replaced by something she couldn't fully name. She saw what she perceived as misdirected frustration. A loss of self-direction. An entire identity rebuilt around one role.


She knew herself well enough to know: that wasn't going to work for her.


So she made a decision before her daughter was born. She was going to stay herself. Not because she was superior or more enlightened — but because she knew that when she wasn't fulfilled, the people around her suffered. That her daughter deserved a mother who was happy. And that happiness, for Paulina, required more than one dimension.


What Selfishness Actually Looks Like

Here's what Paulina's version of selfishness looks like in practice: her daughter is fed, bathed, in school, in activities, deeply loved by every person in their village. And Paulina still takes a shower. Still eats. Still runs a business. Still goes out with her friends. Still works full time in radio.


She credits this, in part, for what she describes as a genuinely great postpartum experience. She had anxiety — she was probably born anxious — but not the postpartum depression she feared. She had a great husband. An incredible mother-in-law and mother. A village she leans on fully and without apology.


She does her work from her daughter's school, which doubles as a co-working space. She calls it her village. She means it.


The point, she is careful to say, is not that her way is the right way. It's that knowing your own way — and having the self-awareness to honor it — makes you a better parent. Not despite the so-called selfishness. Because of it.


What the Mami Collective Actually Is

The Mami Collective started as an idea Paulina couldn't quite define. She knew she wanted to connect moms — but not in the typical mom group way. She wanted something more ambitious, more energetic, more real. And she had no business experience.


She leaned on her best friend and his partner, both marketing professionals, to help her structure it. She launched a podcast as the most natural first step. A website followed. Then a directory. Then a newsletter — public, twice a week, full of grants and media opportunities. Then a private newsletter that goes even deeper, connecting members to pitch opportunities that have landed them in major publications and on local TV.


The Mami Collective is now a directory of member businesses, a community of women getting connected to real opportunities, a dinner series with six events a year in Chicago, and an annual summit — October 1st — that includes panels, a party room, a DJ, food, free drinks, and, last year, a $2,500 business grant funded by Verizon.


The grant winner, for what it's worth, was a woman who left her job to go to HVAC school. She is now a woman doing HVAC work in Chicago. Paulina is still obsessed with her.


Where It's Going

Paulina says this out loud for what she tells us is the first time: she wants the Mami Collective to become one of the biggest summits in the country for moms. She wants it to go nationwide. Eventually worldwide. She wants to give more money to more moms. She wants to keep connecting people to opportunities they wouldn't have found otherwise.


She wants to be Create and Cultivate for moms.

She wants to be Oprah.

And she says it all with the same energy she brought to talking into cassette tapes as a kid — like it is simply a matter of time.


The Takeaway

You are still that girl. Even with the baby on your hip and the school pickup and the never-ending mental load. The ambition didn't leave when the baby arrived. It just needed a community to grow in.


That's what Paulina Roe is building. And there is room for you in it.



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