Dr. Cathy Ashby spent most of her adult life working in education, and until 2013 that’s how she thought she would spend the rest of her career. But circumstances changed and the former Cooper High School teacher and Associate Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction retired in 2013, and one fortuitous phone call led her to the job she now holds.
An old friend Joey Light – now the superintendent of the Wylie ISD, but then her counterpart in C&I – called Ashby and told her that he thought she should apply to be the CEO of United Way-Abilene. Knowing nothing about fundraising or non-profit, Ashby thought Light, also a member of the UW search committee, might be on to something. She applied, and, well, let’s just let Ashby take the story from there.
“I’m pretty clumsy,” she said. “So the first interview I had was with a roomful of people I didn’t know. On the way to the interview, the visor on my car wouldn’t fold up, and I ended up slamming my face into the edge of it, giving me two black eyes. So I walked into this interview and just kind of said, ‘This is who I am.’ “
But she got a callback interview and, for those who know her, she was, as usual, impressive, and knocked the interview out of the park, earning the job. She began on July 8, 2013, and she’s been on the go ever since.
The United Way raises money to support 23 nonprofit agencies in Abilene, everything from Abilene Hope Haven to the Boys and Girls Club to the Cancer Services Network to the Noah Project, among others. She and her staff are, right now, in the middle of the fifth annual Winter Lightfest, one of the agency’s largest fundraisers during the year, and the one that’s the most time-consuming.
Winter Lightfest features a 3/4-mile paved walking path through nearly three million lights with photo opportunities, Santa, a scavenger hunt, hot chocolate, s’mores, and more. The United Way has built a pavilion that now features indoor restrooms, making the pavilion available for events year-round.
Her job with the United Way is year-round as the agency helps those in need because of a myriad of issues from domestic abuse cases to natural disasters.
“This is a fast-paced job, and those 10 years have flown by,” Ashby said. “I didn’t have any experience at all in the nonprofit world when I started. I had always given to United Way but didn’t know what it did. So I spent the entire first year just trying to figure out what we did.”
Just a few years into her tenure, she and her staff helped Abilenians and those in the surrounding counties deal with the aftermath of a tornado in west Abilene that left many in desperate need of housing, clothing, food, and other necessities, followed by COVID in 2020, and Snowmageddon in 2021.
But Ashby’s first crisis she had to manage wasn’t in Abilene or anywhere near here. The Abilene United Way office is one of three 211 call centers in Texas that stand up in case of a state emergency. The other two are located in Houston and Austin, and neither one of those was in commission in August 2017 when Hurricane Harvey – a devastating Category 4 hurricane that made landfall, flooding most of Houston and moving up into Central Texas where Austin also received damaging rain.
Ashby, her staff, and about 12-14 volunteers manned telephones approximately 18 hours per day, trying to help residents in Houston and south Texas stranded by rising floodwaters. One call, in particular, still stands out.
“The most poignant call I remember is a single mom called, and she was in an apartment complex,” Ashby recalled. “The residents were told to go to the highest floor for safety reasons. She said she had two babies with her, and she was trying to get to the highest floor, but there was a man charging people to get past him. I could hear her desperation because she said they were running out of formula for the babies. You know, we had people in those situations who fled their homes and left medicine behind that they needed, so we were trying to find medication for people as well as housing. I’ve learned a lot about disaster relief, but it never crossed my mind I’d be doing that.”
During the tornado aftermath, she and her staff set up their offices for about three weeks at Pioneer Drive Baptist Church, near where the tornado struck. And during COVID, they set up daycare centers for the children of first responders at Martinez and Bonham elementary schools.
“One of the things I’ve learned is that, in a disaster, you stay away,” Ashby said. “But at the United Way, you’re in the middle of people’s worst moments. I’ve learned a lot about disaster relief and coordinating it, what needs to be done, and what can’t wait. And what can’t wait is helping people.”
We recently sat down with Ashby in her office in downtown Abilene and talked about her role as the CEO of the United Way, including how one of the city’s newest holiday traditions came into being.
Q: What are you thinking about every day when you get to work?
Ashby: “This is a helping job, and God blessed me with a heart to help others. That’s why you teach; that’s why you go into education; that’s why you go into these kinds of jobs. I’m thinking about how we can help the most people in the most efficient way possible. How can we do more without asking for more money? I don’t recall the Abilene ISD asking people to open up their pocketbooks, so we’re conscious of how we spend the money. I always think of the sacker in a grocery store who gives from his paycheck, and you want to make sure his money is being spent well, as well as that of the $1 million donor.”
Q: You said you had no experience in a non-profit, so how long did it take to get comfortable asking people for money?
Ashby: “I still don’t ask my friends. I would also say I’m still not as comfortable doing that. I started to get a little more comfortable with it in my third year because we had a lot of things in place, and I could answer their questions because I knew the systems and what we were doing. But it is still humbling when people will give money to you and trust you and the process. It’s gotten easier, but as far as the job in general, I would say it took me a year and a wonderful board chair (Geoff Haney) holding my hand to get through the first year. In the second year, I felt like I could make changes, and by the third year, I thought, ‘I’ve got this.’ “
Q: The economy has fluctuated wildly over the last two years. How does that affect what the United Way can do in the community?
Ashby: “We’ve been blessed, and we’ve done well. In my first campaign in 2013 we raised $800,000. This year, we raised $2.4 million, and we have a foundation with $4 million. These years are hard when the economy is hard. We go to businesses, and everyone is tightening their belts, and philanthropy gets put on the back burner when basic needs are so much higher than they were just a few months earlier. Our campaigns are the hardest in the years we need the most money because people are vulnerable and hurting.”
Q: How much have you seen the need increase in the last 18 months?
Ashby: “Electricity and housing are what we get the most requests for, and it’s not atypical for us not to be able to help someone at this time. We might run out of what we have for electricity or housing before the end of the month. We were able to give City Lights $100,000 at the beginning of the summer just for rent and utilities, and they went through it in one month.”
Q: Are you ever surprised by the amount of need in a place like Abilene?
Ashby: “I don’t think so. We work with so much poverty in the Abilene ISD, so that didn’t surprise me. I’m most surprised by how many children are at Hope Haven, The Noah Project, and the Salvation Army, and that’s heartbreaking. When you see them, you immediately want to know what needs to be done to help them. Hope Haven was one of the first places I visited. I met a mom and her 3-year-old daughter, and she asked if I wanted to see her room. I don’t know what I envisioned, but it wasn’t what I saw. I had the artwork from my kids and now my grandkids on my refrigerator with little magnet, but she had it taped up on a cinderblock wall with two metal bunk beds in the room. I knew about poverty, but I don’t think I understood it until I saw a place like Hope Haven. And that lady said, ‘This is the best place we’ve ever lived.’ That just crushed my heart because we take for granted what we have. We see that every day, and while I hate it, I need to see it because it makes me want to work harder to raise money to try and help.”
Q: Tell me how the Dolly Parton Imagination Library came into being, what it does, and where it can go from here.
Ashby: “We know that 33% of children in Taylor County don’t read on grade level, and we had been receiving calls early in my tenure here asking if we had Dolly Parton Imagination Library because we had military personnel and other new residents who had one in previous cities where they had lived. We began investigating it, and it’s not to be taken lightly. It’s free for the children, but costly to us. You can’t jump into it and not have a long-range plan. But last year, around this time, I had a woman named Julie Wilson call me. She was looking for a way to invest, and I told her about my dream to have the Dolly Parton Imagination Library here. It was one of those God moments where you say the right thing to the right person because she’s passionate about literacy. She said, ‘We love children’s books; we give those at every baby shower, along with something on the registry, and we have a poem that we put in every book.’ I told her we needed a minimum of $100,000 to get it going, and then we met with some foundations and got the go-ahead to get started. We did a soft rollout in May, and we now have 40,000 books in one year that are free to kids in Taylor County and all the counties adjacent to Taylor County. That’s been a fun project on a bucket list of things I thought Abilene needed.”
Q: Right now, your life is being taken up almost 24 hours a day by the Winer Lightfest, which has now become a tradition in Abilene. Tell me how the entire thing came about.
Ashby: “We didn’t have a signature event, so we tried the Key City Rhythm and Blues Festival event, and we loved it, but it wasn’t profitable enough for us. The jazz and blues enthusiasts here loved it, but there weren’t enough of them. Matt Robinson (owner of Lone Star Electric and Christmas Décor in Abilene) decorated our lights at the blues fest, and a couple of years in a row he told us about these Christmas events that people are doing, and he had some friends doing them and they were making a lot of money. He wanted to partner with someone and do one, so that’s how it started. This is our fifth year (2019 was the first year for the event), and after our first year at the State School, we weren’t able to go back out there because they closed the campus to visitors because of COVID. So we started looking for a new piece of land, so I called former school board member Charlie Wolfe because I knew he knew a lot about properties in town, and he told me to come look at a piece of land he owned. He graciously rents it to us for $1 per year, so we take him a ceremonial dollar bill every year. It’s been very successful, and we’ve been blessed. It’s a labor of love because our staff pretty much gives up Thanksgiving and Christmas to do it. We split the profits with Matt, and our goal is to make $200,000 each year and give that out to people who need it. We usually get to that, although last year was a bad year because the weather was so rough.”
Q: You’ve been doing this for five years; what is it that you see every year that makes you want to keep going?
Ashby: “The children make it magical. I always like watching the proposals. Sometimes you just hear people cheering, and you figure you’ve got another one. Those are always fun. Just seeing the kids is what gets us charged up and ready to go out there again.”
Q: It normally takes a while for something to become a tradition. But it seems like in a few short years, this has already become a can’t-miss tradition during the holidays in Abilene. Do you get that sense as well?
Ashby: “I hear that, and it’s something we’re going to keep going for as long as we can. In the third year, we started a scavenger hunt, and in the first week this year we were passing out the cards and someone asked what they would be looking for this year, and I told them they would be looking for trains. So you can tell it’s become a tradition with the kids because they know they’re doing that scavenger hunt.”
Q: In the non-profit world, there’s always a next thing. If that’s the case, what is it for United Way?
Ashby: “There’s not a next thing I know of, but in the nonprofit world , the Baby Boomers – this big group of people – are leaving the workforce because they’ve reached retirement age. Our biggest challenge is connecting to younger parents and donors because a generation of wealth is leaving the workforce. We won’t have the same kind of contacts. We’re learning how to appeal to younger folks, and show them the needs we have here in Abilene.”
