NW Democrat-Gazette

Retirement set for leader of Rockefeller Institute

JAIME ADAME

MORRILTON— Marta Loyd, executive director and chief executive officer for the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute since 2014, will retire March 31, the nonprofit organization announced Monday.

The organization, founded in 2005, is based in central Arkansas at the site of the former governor’s cattle farm on Petit Jean Mountain. Conferences and “purposeful gatherings” are hosted there, according to the organization’s website.

“To honor the legacy of Winthrop Rockefeller is a pretty broad challenge,” Loyd said in an email.

Rockefeller, who became the state’s first Republican governor in more than 90 years after being elected in 1966, is credited with leading the racial integration of the Arkansas State Police, among other accomplishments, according to the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas.

The Winthrop Rockefeller Institute is about “bringing people together on the mountain, as he once did” and “helping our constituents create transformational change in their organizations or for the causes they care about,” Loyd said, describing the “Rockefeller Ethic” as involving “diversity of opinion + respectful dialogue + collaborative problem solving.”

Before taking on the top leadership role, Loyd worked for 17 years at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith.

Her time at the university included 12 years as the university’s top fundraising officer. She also served as executive director of the UAFS Foundation.

Loyd, who will be 62 upon her retirement, described working to set up the Winthrop Rockefeller Institute for the future.

When she first began, an annual grant from the Winthrop Rockefeller Charitable Trust was relied upon to cover operating expenses, Lloyd said.

She said she led the effort to secure a permanent endowment for the institute of more than $100 million that’s held by the University of Arkansas Foundation. The annual spending allocation from this endowment “now covers a large percentage of our annual operations,” Lloyd said.

“But our work of bringing people together around difficult issues like education, incarceration, and rural health takes additional resources beyond basic operational costs,” Lloyd said. “So during my time as CEO, we established a development program to help us raise private dollars to support our programming efforts.”

The organization’s board of directors will search for a new executive director and chief executive officer, with a position description posted on the institute’s website that states the new directors will oversee a $6 million budget and a staff of about 65 people.

Stephanie Gardner, chairperson of the institute’s board of directors, in a statement praised Loyd for having a “significant and lasting” impact on the organization.

“Marta is committed to the idea that the most effective problem solving is accomplished through collaboration,” said Gardner, who is provost and chief strategy officer at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. “That commitment embodied Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller’s legacy and became the guiding vision of this Institute.”

Northwest Arkansas

en-us

2021-12-07T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-12-07T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://edition.nwaonline.com/article/281990380814351

WEHCO Media