Sericia Cole is one of those people who make Little Rock feel like a small town.

To go to lunch with her is to smile through an invasion of ‘‘hellos.’’ Tag along on a work event, and you’re nothing more than an FOS – Friend of Sericia.

“I grew up in Little Rock, too,” says Cherise McCall, Cole’s best friend of 23 years. “But when I go with her to a work event, it is definitely not my room. I’m with Sericia.”

Cole is good with names in a way that goes beyond greetings. When she talks, she peppers sentences with listener’s first names and even the mundane seems suddenly intimate. It’s a polished move used by many communicators, but Cole pulls it off with sincerity. In that room full of ‘‘hellos,’’ she cares about each one.

At just 18, Cole was working as a part-time production assistant at KATV, Channel 7, the start to a lengthy resume of media, communications and public relations positions. Her career has moved so quickly it leaves most lunchtime run ins with the opening line “Where are you at now?”

The Mosaic Templars Cultural Center – to Cole, simply “the museum” – has been the answer since July last year. She came as interim director, but the title became permanent in November. And it wasn’t an immediately popular decision.

“The African American community is really protective of the museum,” Cole says. “There are people who thought I was too young for this job, that I am too young to appreciate the history.”

But at 41, Cole at times seems more sure of her history than those decades older. Her age belies the many experiences that brought her here. A serious child, pastor’s daughter and mother at 18. A woman who found and lost her dream job by 30.

“I’m really not that young.”

NEVER A BABY

Mamie Battle stopped pushing her oldest daughter in a stroller when she was 10 months old.

Mamie and her husband, Hayward Battle Sr., were living on Main Street in Little Rock and she was trying to take Sericia for a walk in the stroller Hayward had bought.

“She was acting up so her mother took her out of the stroller,” Hayward says. “Sericia [got behind it and] just started pushing it herself. We never put her in a stroller again.”

Sericia Cole grew up as a focused child in a driven household. She went to school with her mother, a teacher. Her father, a minister and lawyer, helped inspire a love of words that never left.

“I had an awesome childhood. We were this idealistic, nuclear family, middle class, spiritual,” she says. “We sat down to dinner together.”

Looking back, Cole realizes it was a childhood that left her a little naive. She was a freshman at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and was in love with her high school boyfriend. At 18, Cole was to become a mother.

She can still remember the trauma of telling her family, but in the aftermath, the Battles lived up to their surname.They rallied around Cole and her newborn son, Julien. The pair moved back in with her parents, and Mamie helped take care of the baby while Cole went back to school.

“At the end of her life, my mother will be remembered as a ferocious protector,” Cole says. “She has given us everything.”

Cole followed her mother’s example, putting everything into work, school and raising Julien. By 21, she had turned her part-time production assistant role at KATV to a co-producing role at the station’s early morning show, Daybreak. The energy of live TV almost made the 3:30 a.m. alarm times worthwhile. But something about writing for anchors wasn’t clicking.

“I was sitting in the newsroom and in walks this woman in a suit, walking really fast,” Cole says. “I thought ‘Whatever she’s doing, I want to do that.’”

The suit was director of community relations. And Cole was going to do what it took to get there.

DANGERS OF DREAMING

Look at Cole’s work history now and one thing is clear: She gets restless.

No job has held her for more than four years, and Cole says it likely never will.

“I have serious cases of ennui,” Cole says. “I love the challenge and once things get to where I can work with my eyes closed, I need to go on to something else.”

Determined to work her way up in the public relations world in Little Rock, Cole left KATV for a receptionist’s job at KIPR-FM, 92.3, (Power 92) a short stint with a small ad agency, and a few years as a promotions director at KSSN-FM, 96. For four years – her longest stretch to date – Cole worked at Centers for Youth and Families as a program coordinator and community relations director.

“The agency was so sound and so well run,” Cole says. “It was one of the turning points in my career because I learned so much as a professional.”

In 2000, just before Cole turned 30, her dream job came calling. The lady in the suit at KATV had left the station, and the director of community relations job was open. Cole left the responsibilities and the connections she’d built at the center for the job she’d been thinking of for nearly a decade. She was ready.

But like all things built up for so long – the job didn’t live up.

“TV was starting to change,” Cole says. “When I got there, the job was a pared-down version of what it had been. I thought, ‘Dang, I should have dreamed higher.’”

The position wasn’t without reward. Cole met constantly with nonprofits in the city that needed station sponsorships, or an anchor to help host an event. She began sitting on committees and becoming a recognizable face of Channel 7 in the community. She experienced the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, from inside the newsroom, and got a daily dose of the energy she missed from live TV.

“It was media and it was public relations and it was getting out in the community,” Cole says. “It was a merger of loves.”

Two years in, Cole started to get her trademark ennui – but something felt different this time.

“There’s a weird vibe that something is coming,” Cole says. “You hear whispers.”

The company restructured, and KATV eliminated Cole’s dream job.

Devastated and exhausted, Cole drove to her mother’s house and sobbed. She faced the next 10 months jobless, going through a divorce and moving into a place of her own as a single mother.

“I had a broken heart, I was losing it, I didn’t have a job or a career … the things I’d always prided myself on,” Cole says.

Days were spent with her kids, and in prayer. She relied on her faith to lead her to what should come next. But no matter what path she followed, she’d never again define herself by her job.

“I remember my mom told me, ‘That’s their job. Just like they gave it to you, they can always take it away,’” Cole says. “I wasn’t going to be hurt like that again by a job.”

NEW CHAPTERS

It isn’t like Cole to crack. Her tough exterior is usually broken through only by family and a few select friends. It seems like she knows everyone in Little Rock, but few can say they truly know Cole.

“She can come off as aloof and to some she seems a little arrogant,” McCall says. “But it’s because she’s in observation mode. When you get to know her, she’s one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.”

At work, her toughness translates to dedication. No matter what the job, Cole has been consistent in her desire to work for Arkansas, Little Rock and the black community. After a bout of unemployment and jobs she took just to get by, Cole re-emerged in 2003 in the middle of two startups. She took on the role of editor at PowerPlay magazine, a glossy dedicated to covering movers and shakers in Little Rock’s black community. A few months later, she was tapped as development director of City Year as it took root in the city. The nonprofit’s young adult corps members help children stay on track for high school graduation.

“It was bananas,” Cole says. “I got very little sleep. When I look back on that now, it was so hard. But so exhilarating.”

But even startup exhilaration was no match for Cole’s need for change. In 2006, she took a job as director of public relations at Philander Smith College. In 2010, the governor’s office came calling, and you don’t ignore that.

“All my friends are lawyers [and] politicians, and in the background I’ve always paid attention,” Cole says. “I don’t know why I didn’t think I could do it, because it’s all about people.”

Cole began a two-year stay as director of external affairs for Governor Mike Beebe, a liaison between the governor’s office and the people of Arkansas.

“When the previous director left, there was only one person I was considering and it was her,” says Deputy Chief of Staff Lamar Davis. “She is the kind of person where you’re left wondering if there’s anything she can’t do.”

Her job included a focus on minority affairs, taking her all across the state. She began to see more clearly that Arkansans weren’t doing enough “to brag on themselves.”

“You know Southerners, we’re really modest,” Cole says. “People have these misconceptions about who we are as a people.”

ABOUT THIS LEGACY

While traveling for the governor’s office left Cole with an even stronger love for Arkansas and its people, it also left her knowing that for the black community, there was more work to be done.

Ask Cole her pet peeve about society and she paraphrases Martin Luther King Jr.: Content and character still take a back seat to the color of one’s skin. And she doesn’t see it changing in her lifetime.

“Unfortunately, because my children are not babies, it won’t be their generation,” Cole says. “My grandchildren, perhaps. It’s going to take time.”

Seeing Little Rock take more pride in the history of the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center could be a start.

“In my opinion, I don’t think the city appreciates exactly what [this museum] means,” Cole says.

A year after leaving the governor’s office to help run the museum, Cole pours out the history of the Mosaic Templars with reverence and ease.Founded by two former slaves, the Mosaic Templars sold burial insurance in the late 1800s when blacks were turned away by white-run companies. From there, the business grew into a publishing house, savings and loan, and nurse training school. The site where the museum now stands was an anchor for the bustling black business district.

The museum celebrates its fifth anniversary in September, and Cole wants this year to bring as much attention to the mission as possible.

“It’s not about me, it’s about this legacy and what we want to teach our children,” Cole says. “We want them to know about the people whose shoulders we stand on.”

Cole has taken each of her children – Julien, Sydney and Evan – to the museum over the years, since before she was director. Despite a hectic work schedule, she has always been the mother who makes it to basketball games, cheerleading competitions and church. Since 2007, Cole and her husband, Rod, have worked to meld their blended family of seven kids. With the youngest now in middle school, Cole says parenting is starting to loosen its grip and the reasons that have kept her in Little Rock are starting to fade.

Her home, church, job and family are here. But she’s still dreaming.

“I really wrestle with moving away,” Cole says. “I’m working [on] what’s next. It’s exciting and frightening all at once. I think about writing a book or being a motivational speaker.”

With Cole, there’s little doubt that she’ll make it happen. She’s still pretty young.

SELF PORTRAIT Sericia Cole

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Sept. 19, 1971, in Brinkley

ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP: Evolving

NICKNAME: “Punkin”

I KNEW I WAS GROWN UP when I became a mother.

IF I’VE LEARNED ONE THING IN MY LIFE: Excellence isn’t an accomplishment; it’s a spirit.

FAVORITE CHILDHOOD MEMORY: Spending time with my maternal grandparents in Biscoe during summers. My grandparents are long deceased, but I still have a visceral reaction when I travel Interstate 40 and pass the Biscoe exit.

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, I WANTED TO GROW UP TO BE a TV news anchor.

MY FIRST JOB was working part time in my father’s law office.

PEOPLE WHO KNEW ME IN HIGH SCHOOL THOUGHT I WAS smart and cute but mean.

I WANT MY CHILDREN TO REMEMBER that I gave them the very best of myself.

THE BOOK I’VE READ MOST: Listening for God: A Minister’s Journey Through Silence and Doubt by Renita Weems

THE PEOPLE WHO HAD THE BIGGEST IMPACT ON MY LIFE: My parents, Mamie & Hayward Battle