Marta Loyd

Slowing down didn't work out

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JOHN SYKES JR. - HP Cover - Marta Loyd is the executive director of the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JOHN SYKES JR. - HP Cover - Marta Loyd is the executive director of the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute.

Picture a 200-acre mountaintop retreat, surrounded by some of the most spectacular scenery in Arkansas, where eminent scholars, researchers, policy makers and other leaders seek dialogue on some of the nation's most vexing problems. Such a place potentially exists in the form of the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute on Petit Jean Mountain near Morrilton. Over the past decade, the institute has hosted conferences, lectures and other events revolving around important issues -- but few would say it has become a world-class educational conference center.

"I think it has not reached its potential," Archie Schaffer, a board member of the institute, says. "There are two things about the institute being up there on the mountain. It is an absolutely fabulous facility in a beautiful location, but it is an hour away from almost anything else. The isolation is both a positive and a negative."

Date and place of birth: Dec. 26, 1959, Oklahoma City

One surprising thing about life on Petit Jean Mountain: The community of people who live up here are highly accomplished and quite involved.

My family would say I’m dedicated to my work but committed to my family. I am happiest when we are all together.

I like photographing nature, friends and family. When photographing people I prefer to shoot them when they don’t know I’m there.

My parents, in a nutshell: My dad taught me to have a work ethic, and my mother taught me the value of relationships, to appreciate music and all things beautiful.

A pet peeve of mine: Dishonesty

I read or listen to several books at once — currently Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, in anticipation of the new Broadway play based on it; Leading in a Culture of Change by Michael Fullan; and The Other 1492: Ferdinand, Isabella, and the Making of an Empire.

My favorite book is Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. It’s the complex story of a man’s life that includes love, war, social inequalities, perseverance and a whole lot of what we call “life’s not always fair.”

Guests at my fantasy dinner party: Winthrop Rockefeller, David McCullough, Warren Buffett, Charlie Rose, Condoleezza Rice and Mother Teresa

And the menu: vegetables fresh from the garden and ice cream for dessert.

One word that describes me: Grateful

To make that combination work, the institute has turned to a woman whose dedication to work nearly killed her.

It was 4:30 a.m. on a winter morning in 2008 when Marta Loyd's car started spinning across an icy highway in Fort Smith. Loyd was on her way to the airport to catch a flight, not unusual back in her period of 16-hour work days. The night before, she'd hosted the naming of a gallery space on the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith campus, where she was vice chancellor for university advancement. Then she'd gone home, thrown a few things in a suitcase and caught a few hours of sleep before starting what she thought would be a weeklong trip to a conference of college officials.

Loyd's Camry slammed into the median wall, bounced back onto the road and slid into the pathway of an 18-wheeler doing about 70 miles an hour. The collision smashed in the front of her car and peeled the hood back to its interior.

The collision drove the nose of the car into the body, compressing the space everywhere around Loyd's body.

"I remember thinking, 'this is how it ends for me,'" Loyd says. She used the instant before impact to say a mental goodbye to her husband and three children.

When her car came to a stop, Loyd climbed out of the back of the smoking wreckage and walked down the highway until a passerby stopped her, stunned that she could have walked away from the accident. Loyd, just as surprised, had escaped with nothing more than a bruised wrist.

Loyd says the accident "stopped me. It got my attention." At the time, she was heading up a $50 million fundraising campaign for UAFS and working on her doctoral degree, with one child still at home. For a couple of days after the crash, she says, "I basically couldn't go anywhere. I wouldn't leave the house. I was very confused about why I was allowed to survive."

But Loyd says she "couldn't really stop" doing any of what she cared about so much, "so basically I just became much more focused on what I could and could not do within a 24-hour day. I was home more. I tried to slow down."

When her doctoral dissertation was finished, Loyd found a hobby, photography, that indulged her creative side and gave her at least a partial answer to the question that had been bothering her: "How can you stop wanting to work all the time?"

Hygienist to Vice Chancellor

Loyd grew up in Fort Smith, where her father was a surgeon and her mother a homemaker who loved the arts.

"I wasn't that goal-oriented growing up," she says. "I just enjoyed life."

She met her husband, family practice physician Greg Loyd, while earning a degree in dental hygiene at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. She worked part time as a dental hygienist while her children were young, an arrangement that seemed ideal until about the time her youngest son, Bryan, started school.

"In fact, I was pretty miserable," she says. "I literally prayed for a challenge. I was just very bored, and it weighed on me."

Perhaps worried about how that sounds, Loyd adds, "I love being a mother. It's the most important thing in my life. But as trite as it sounds, I wanted to make a difference in the world around me."

Loyd took a part-time job as a program coordinator in continuing education with Westark Community College -- which became UAFS -- and was asked to start a program for dental hygienists there. She went to work for the college full time, crafting a curriculum, hiring personnel and recruiting students.

Loyd could have run the new program, but she'd gone to Westark to do something bigger than dental hygiene. Westark offered her a job in development, as fundraising in nonprofit circles is sometimes called. Loyd says her first boss in that office, Carolyn Moore, "is the one who saw potential in me, who made me reach higher and do more."

When Moore left, Loyd drafted a 10-year plan for increasing the school's endowment and took it to the president, Joel Stubblefield, another mentor. She became vice chancellor for university advancement, as development in higher education is sometimes called, just as Westark transformed into UAFS. Loyd helped the school's endowment grow from $20 million to nearly $80 million. She also supervised marketing, communications and alumni relations.

"She's a wonderful personality to work with, extremely smart and really knew her job," says Neal Pendergraft, a Fayetteville lawyer and former board member of the university's foundation. About the only criticism board members had of Loyd, he says, was that she "put in very long hours."

Youngest son Bryan says the career change seemed to kick start a drive in his mother that hasn't let up yet.

"I'll never forget, any time we would go to eat somewhere in Fort Smith, she always took an interest in what our waitress or waiter was doing, if they were in school," says Bryan, who's finishing up his master's degree in accounting at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. "If not, she would always make sure to say, 'Here's my card. Come by and see me.' She just cares so much about people.'"

Loyd earned her own master's degree in higher educational leadership from UA at the age of 40, then a doctorate in educational leadership and policy analysis from the University of Missouri 10 years later, writing her thesis on stewardship, as the careful handling of donors is sometimes called.

"If the endowment is properly managed, that number of scholarships will only continue to grow in time. That's making a real difference," Loyd says, reflecting on her work at UAFS.

Loftier Goals

Winthrop Rockefeller bought the property that became Winrock Farms -- and, later, the eponymous institute -- in 1953. According to most accounts, it was thought best that the hard-drinking member of one of America's wealthiest families find something to do outside the temptation and media glare of New York. In Arkansas, Rockefeller found his own mission and transformed a place through a mix of heavy philanthropy and politics.

He ran for governor and lost in 1964, ran again and won in 1966. From 1967 to 1971, Rockefeller gained a reputation for inviting big thinkers to the mountaintop. Loyd likes to tell the story of how, after the formation of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, Rockefeller hosted his fellow commissioners for a retreat, and subsequently, AIDC had some success in attracting new employers to the state.

"It is my goal for the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute to do work of equivalent magnitude," Loyd says.

After Rockefeller's death, the property was used by Winrock International, an organization funded by the Winthrop Rockefeller Charitable Trust. Winrock subsequently moved its headquarters to Little Rock and Washington.

Established by the University of Arkansas System 10 years ago, again with a grant from the Winthrop Rockefeller Charitable Trust, the institute has had three directors. One-time North Little Rock city manager David Davies served in that role from its inception until 2010, helping rebuild and expand the facility. In 2011, the institute used a well-known executive search firm to hire Christy Carpenter for the job. Carpenter was well connected politically and a lawyer by training who'd been running the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles and New York. At the time, the institute's chairman said her talents would be ideal in a "pivotal time of transformation of the institute."

She left two years later, naming the institute's "isolated" location as one reason for her departure.

Loyd, after 17 years at UAFS, was "really restless." Her husband learned of the opening for an executive director at the Rockefeller Institute and suggested she apply.

"I was 55," she says. "I just felt like maybe I could do one more thing."

In February last year Loyd acceded to a job whose duties include overseeing 97 employees, some of whom have spent decades working on the mountain, plus facilities ranging from lodging and meeting spaces to a restaurant, gift shop and museum. The institute hosted about 650 conference groups and 11,000 guests for everything from concerts to cooking classes during a recent 12-month period.

The institute's bigger goals are to become an integral part of the UA system, a place where the most important issues of the day are examined. Loyd has spent her first year meeting with chancellors and other officials from UA campuses across the state, letting them know the institute wants to work with them.

FULL TIME ON PETIT JEAN

"She hit the ground listening," says Donald Bobbitt, president of the UA system. "She's been very active in making sure each of the institutions that [make up] the U of A system know about the center, know what's up there, and how she can help them in accomplishing things that are important to them."

Loyd is working on a 10-year strategic plan for the institute, part of which is establishing the institute's "brand" as a place that drives progress on issues.

While the institute has been plenty busy, Loyd says, "we haven't been as deliberate as what we now want to be. We haven't been as focused. We've been a bit more responsive. Now we want to be proactive. We want to play a role in determining what the issues are by working through experts in the UA system as well as policy makers."

As an example, from May 6 to 9 the institute will co-sponsor a conference on radiation injury with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. UAMS is one of the leading institutions involved in research into topics such as radiation injury to cancer patients during treatment, the effects of radiation from dirty bombs and other radiologic emergencies, and the impact of radiation on space travelers. Loyd says the conference expects to bring 75 radiation researchers from around the world to Petit Jean, and it was the result of conversations with Dr. Dan Rahn, chancellor of UAMS.

Other forthcoming events include a "boot camp" for social entrepreneurs in July, in partnership with the Clinton School for Public Service and the UA Walton College of Business; a community development program for the five counties surrounding the institute -- Conway, Perry, Pope, Van Buren and Yell -- that begins in August; and the release of a 10-year plan to combat obesity in Arkansas sometime later this year.

While a predecessor complained about Petit Jean's isolation, Loyd considers the institute's "Lake House," a ranch-style home on 10 acres (five of them a lake) that she calls home, a perk. She uses the spread to entertain the institute's guests. Outside, she often sees deer, turkey, beavers and other wildlife.

"From about every room in the house you can see the lake," she says.

Greg Loyd is now commuting to work at an occupational health clinic in Van Buren during the week. He expects to start a job at a new clinic in central Arkansas within the year, allowing him to live full time on Petit Jean.

The couple's oldest child, Susan McDonald, who lives in Bryant, is a dentist with the state prison system; their middle child, Scott, is in sales in Tulsa, Okla.; and youngest son Bryan says his mother "will do anything" to spend time with her granddaughter, Susan's girl, Annie.

A Bible lays on Loyd's desk at the institute, often opened to Psalm 91: "He is my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust." Loyd says the 2008 accident "solidified" her faith.

Surrounded by nature, Loyd is using her new home on the mountain to practice photography, the hobby she took up after her accident.

Asked about the other product of that episode -- her vow to quit working so much -- she smiles.

"I might be lapsing because I have a newfound purpose here."

NAN Profiles on 04/26/2015

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