Leading by example

SELF PORTRAITDate and place of birth: July 17, 1971, Sioux Falls, S.D.

Occupation: Executive director of Single Parent Scholarship Fund Family: Husband Mark, daughters Gracie and Genna, son Ethan My favorite entertaining recipe: broiled bacon-wrapped jalapeno-stuffed green olives My favorite place to vacation is: on a lake, any lake.

A fashion trend I never fell victim to was: the “bowhead” look. I’ve never had long hair.

I wouldn’t have met my husband if it weren’t for: a broken AC unit and a little white lie.

Something or someone who inspires me everyday is: Mark Dilday, for his work ethic and quiet strength.

The best advice I ever received was: Instead of hiring me for a corporate job, the HR manager told me “You need to go and get that ‘social work’ thing out of your system.” The secret to life is: fi nding balance.

The best job or responsibility I’ve ever had is: to be mom to Gracie, Ethan and Genna.

Favorite movie: The Outsiders A word or two that sums me up: child of GodIt’s 3 in the afternoon and Jody Dilday, executive director for the Single Parent Scholarship Fund, finds herself caught in the slow, circular procession of vehicles at daughter Genna’s middle school.

But today is different. A heavy, sinking sensation is anchored in her chest. Without thinking about it, her fingers grip the steering wheel tighter and tighter, until her knuckles turn white. Staring into the brake lights in front of her, it takes no effort at all to slip back into that tedious night on the freeway, just a few years ago.

That night Dilday looked out the car window, into the vehicle stopped next to hers on the freeway. She had been headed to Dallas, but everyone had stopped. The blank stare that people get when a TV channel blacks out, when their eyes glaze over, unable to break away as they wait for the signal to come back - that’s the look these people had.

As a development director for the American Red Cross, she had seen that look before. It fueled a rising anxiety in her as they inched along, finding their way past cars whose fuel supply had long been depleted,leaving them stranded. In her experience, these situations meant violence. They meant filth. She didn’t know who would be the first to snap, but she knew it would happen.

She had gotten on the road with her co-worker, Dalinda, at 8 the evening before Hurricane Rita was set to arrive in 2005. They thought they could drive from Houston to Dallas to catch a plane where their connecting flight would have been, rather than waiting to leave the day the storm came ashore.

They’d been on the road for hours and they hadn’t even made it to Waco, a distance of some 185 miles. Her cellphone rang, and an overwhelming mix of emotions hit her. Calling was Jon Williams of the Jon and Jen (Colonna) radio show back home. They wanted an inside view of what was happening, and Dilday was the only source they had. She began to cry.

“Jon, I don’t want you to put me on the radio because I don’t want my kids on their way to school to hear the fear in my voice,” she said.

“You’re in the midst of something that everyoneis concerned about and is thinking about, and you’re someone we know,” Williams said. “Tell us. Tell us what you see, tell us about it.”

She did the interview. But before hanging up, she said “tell Gracie, Ethan and Genna and Mark that mommy loves them and I’ll be home tonight.”

She wasn’t home that night, but when she returned, her time at the Red Cross quickly came to a close. She had three young children who needed her. Maybe she could spend her time traveling and helping people later, but now was not the time.

Snap back to the school line: Dilday’s concentration breaks as she pulls out of the processional. She takes her eyes off the brake lights in front of her, checks her rear-view mirror, and, realizing she’s no longer running from deadly storms, gets back to life as a mother and professional.

EARLY DETERMINATION

Jody Dilday is one of those rare people who has known from childhood what she wanted to do withher life. As a 4-year-old in a family that was adopting a baby, she met a caseworker with Lutheran Social Services. After that meeting, she knew that was what she wanted to do. In fourth grade, she read The Great Gilly Hopkins. The tale, about the relationship between a social worker and a foster child, solidified her conviction and made choosing a college major a breeze.

“I knew right away,” Dilday says. “I went in to my first adviser and said, ‘I’m going to be a social worker, just tell me what to do to do that’ … it was just the plan from the beginning. Nobody told me any different.”

She spent some time with the Boys and Girls Club-associated Latchkey Child Services as part of a college course, interned with Youth Bridge and for Department of Human Services, and worked for Charter Vista Hospital. Atthe Latchkey program, it was Dilday’s job to take referrals from families needing services, a responsibility that gave her time to observe troubled teens and juvenile delinquents. At first, the bad is all she saw, but years of social work eventually taught her to look for the good in people and foster their strengths.

“These workers [at Latchkey] would say about every kid, who I saw as criminals in the making, ‘oh, he’s such a neat kid.’ And I’d say ‘Neat kid? He’s an arsonist, he’s a this, he’s a that.’ And now I know. It’s like when I’m here [at Single Parent Scholarship Fund], now all our people are neat, all of our students are really inspiring,” she says. “I mean, they are all so compelling and there’s so much potential in every person. You have to cling onto that hope, you have to believe that you can make a difference for thatkid.”

More than six years ago, before Dilday became executive director at the scholarship fund for Carroll, Madison and Washington counties, she couldn’t imagine relating to single parents.

“What do I know about single parents?” she asked herself. “My parents are still married, my grandparents are still married, I’d been married 10 or 15 years at that point and I thought, ‘nope, not for me, not my job.’”

If it hadn’t been for Marsha McCain, Dilday may have passed up the job. McCain attended church with Dilday, knew the job was open and asked her to reconsider. This time, when Dilday looked at the scholarship fund’s mission, she saw it was rooted in removing families from poverty, a core value developed during her time with the Department of Human Servicesand Youth Bridge.

“I found myself saying ‘this is a good family, you know. This family has strengths.’ There are some issues, but often it wasn’t their own fault, it was something outside of them,” she says. “What we do here is the American equivalent to Heifer [International]. Instead of giving our families a cow or goat, which then they can earn their living from and feed theirfamily, we’re giving them an education, so that they can compete in the job market, so that they can financially support their own family. It’s the same thing, we’re giving them a tool.” FORGING PATHS

Dilday’s natural inclination to help people was stirred, and soon she realized she had more in common with the single parents than she thought.

“I’m a mom and they’re a mom,” she says. “We all feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of raising a child, providing for a child, all of those things.”

One student, after a particularly tough semester, came for an interview in hopes of getting another scholarship, and got emotional as she began to leave.

“I told her ‘it’s all over now, the interview’s over,’” Dilday said, and reached out to hug and comfort her, telling her that everything wasgoing to be all right. Later, the student said that Dilday’s compassion was appreciated because, “as a mom, a single mom, I’m the one who always has to give out the hugs and encouragement.”

Jim Crouch, partner at Cypert, Crouch, Clark & Harwell, PLLC, got to know Dilday through the scholarship fund’s board of directors and has seen her kind spirit in action.

“She has the perfect combination of skills you need for this job,” he says. “She really has a great balance in her leadership skills, a passion for the organization and clients we serve, as well as just having business skills to run [it.]”

For Dilday, being that well-rounded support system is the most rewarding part ofthe job, along with seeing single parents transform before her eyes. The fund uses the financial support of the community and the guidance of its staff to instill a sense of vested confidence in clients,something that radiates in their face and stance.

While looking through photos from fundraisers, Dilday had trouble recognizing someone. In the photo, the woman“looked like a lot of the families I worked with at the Department of Human Services,” Dilday says. “Now this young woman could walk into any Northwest Arkansas young professionals event and command the room.

“It’s like we’re watching butterflies emerge from the cocoon all the time, every semester.”

Dilday’s job also allows her to keep personal priorities in order. Her experience while working in Hurricane Rita was a wake-up call, inciting the desire to do the most good she could for otherswhile being closer to home. She began that part of her life with a brief position as a fundraiser for an arts organization.

“I took it and thought ‘this’ll be cushy, this’ll be easyfundraising, this’ll be great,’” she says. “I won’t have to work when the wind blows, it’ll be so fun.”

But right away, she didn’t have the satisfaction of really helping others. The Single Parent Scholarship job fit the fundraising-meets-social-work niche while allowing her to be an attentive, supportive parent.

“I was so committed to the Red Cross that I started to lose my own identity,” she says. “I was losing Jody and losing mommy and I was not the best wife because I was so focused on and involved in my work.

“I wanted to be a wife and a mom with a career, not a career woman who happens to have a husband and kids.” SOMETHING TO OFFER

Dilday met her husband, Mark, soon after beginning college. Her family moved to Arkansas from Sioux Falls, S.D., for her father’s job near the end of 1988, during her senior year in high school. Once she fulfilled her course requirements to graduate she joined the family, spending the months leading up to entering college working retail and making friends.

Her parents, meanwhile, had become friends with a construction worker who, when working on the house next door, noted their faltering air conditioning unit. Soon, the worker and her parents were tailgating together at Razorbacks football games. Dilday decided to join them one Saturday.

“I knew that my parents had this construction worker friend named Mark and that’s all I knew,” she said. “I went to the game with them one day and got out of the car and they waved at Mark. I said, ‘That’s Mark?’”

Despite her favorable reaction, Dilday wasn’t eager to get to know Mark because of a long-distance romance that was still in the works.

A year later, she was meeting her parents at Mark’s place after a game to catch a ride home and realized she couldn’t find her house key. The key had been snatched by her little brother, who suspected Mark and Jody had a crush on each other and was trying his hand at matchmaking. To her disappointment, her brother confessed he had the key before their parents left for home, foiling the plan that would have given her an excuse to spend time withMark.

“So my mom said, ‘Well, you could pretend like you lost a key,’” Dilday says.

She returned to Mark’s apartment.

“We were on our hands and knees digging around on the dirt, looking for a key I knew was not there and I started to feel really foolish,” Dilday says. After a bit of searching, he asked her to stay for a party and return to renew the key search the following day. A few days later they had their first date, and she knew that Mark was the person she would spend her life with.

Mark and Jody married before she graduated college, and began their family four years later. With three children - Gracie, 17, Ethan, 15, and Genna, 12 - Dilday says their world today is “messy and chaotic and busy and hilarious and frustrating.”

They have managed their family in a manner similar to her parents, sharing responsibilities, making Mark an equal partner - one who changed diapers, fed and bathed the kids and helps with homework- just as regularly as she.

As a result, she says, he shares a great bond with the children. Over the years, Mark has become an intuitive partner too. “He knows what I need to recharge my batteries,” Dilday says. “He’s my biggest, quietest cheerleader.”

Mark says he was initially drawn to Jody by her beauty but soon came to admire her for her work ethic and strong ties to the church. He has watched her become a strong businesswoman and agood mother.

“She’s very bright, fun-loving, outgoing, which I’m not,” he says. “It forces me to be out in the world; it’s good for me. Jody is a strong, vibrant lady who doesn’t let her fears get the best of her.

“I have grown to appreciate her confidence, personality and personal beliefs. I hope to spend the rest of my life here on earth and then after with her.”

The two work on setting a good example for the children, one that includes staying involved at church and actively serving others. This means the kids sometimes attend Single Parent Scholarship Fund events and volunteer alongside her at Rotary Club activities.

“I’m not the kind of mom that goes into their closet and helps them pick out their clothes,” she says. “They’ve been dressing themselves since they were able to, and I don’t get up and cook them breakfast [every] morning.”

While fostering a sense of independence, the couple still make sure the children have a strong safety net and good environment in which to test it.

They have lived near Erin Cohen and her family for 10 years. Cohen often picks the Dilday kids up from school.

“We do everything from borrow an egg, borrow a cup of sugar, to coming to each other’s important life events,” Cohen says. “Many times we will wait until the kids are in bed and sit on my front porch and have a glass of wine.

“Her family has been invaluable to us, through hardships and the death of my parents, the birth of my children,” she says. “We could never move because we just want to have them as friends.”

All in all, Dilday sees her job at the scholarship fund as one mutually benefiting her clients, herself and her children.

“I think I’m setting an example for my daughters: that you don’t have to be the perfect Holly Homemaker to have a house; that you should fulfill yourself through your vocation, through your friendships; that [doing so] doesn’t make you a bad mom, a selfish mom … it makes you a mom with something to offer.”