Jim McAllister grew up in Alabama and has great childhood memories of visiting the Blue Ridge Mountains as a kid.   “Mom would load up the station wagon and all of us – I had three brothers – would head up here because it was always so hot in Alabama.  But we would come up here and it was always nice and cool!”    He went to the University of Alabama for a Business degree and spent over 35 years in sales and sales management.  Jim grew up a sports fan and played basketball when he was younger.   He’s now a rabid UNCA Bulldogs basketball fan and has had season tickets for several years. 

“Working in sales gave me the opportunity to travel and when I moved into management, I had employees all across the US, including in Hawaii and Guam.    Working for a check printer let me even travel to Hong Kong and the Philippines, places that I had only dreamt about up until that time.   I also had employees in Canada, so I was able to learn about that country, as well.”

Jim has experience as a Guardian ad Litem in the Texas family court system, where he was a Court Appointed Special Advocate for Children (CASA) for 5 years.     After experiencing the death from cancer of a close friend’s 16 year-old son, he and others turned their anger and grief into founding SebastianStrong Foundation, which raises money to fund early-stage pediatric cancer.   Jim is on that Board and serves as Chairman of SebastianStrong’s Medical Advisory Board, which makes decisions on what research to fund.  Under his leadership, the Foundation has funded almost $3 million in pediatric cancer research.

Jim is an avid reader and hiker, enjoying his “dream come true” retirement in Woodfin!   He likes to say that “he’s his mother’s son” and since she worked so hard in volunteer activities, it comes naturally to him to serve Woodfin as an elected official.