June 26, 2011 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Why she’s leaving: Becky Sykes, 65, will retire at the end of June after 12 years as president of the Dallas Women’s Foundation, a community fund that gives about $2-million annually to charities aiding women and children.
Background: One of 19 women who created the foundation in 1985, Ms. Sykes served as its first board chair. In 1998, she left her job as development director at Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts to take an interim position leading the fund. “I had no plans to stay, but when I got here I felt so strongly about what was possible for the foundation,” she says.
Biggest accomplishment: Significantly expanding the organization. As a result of a recent five-year fund-raising campaign, which raised $36-million, the foundation went from having about nine donor-advised funds to 35, and 27 donors who have given at least $1-million compared with just one before the campaign began. Ms. Sykes is also proud of the foundation’s research work: It produces analyses of how the Texas state budget will affect women and children, and of how women in northern Texas are faring.
Biggest challenge: Aside from the perpetual need to raise money, Ms. Sykes says there hasn’t been enough progress on women’s issues over the last 30 years. “It’s shocking the disparities we still see in earning capacity, in access to corporate jobs,” she says. “The other big thing we have not resolved is child care.”
Salary: $150,000
What’s next: She plans to spend a lot of time with her grandchildren, take classes in women’s history, creative writing, and Spanish, and read more books. On her list: Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff, and Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S.C. Gwynne. Ms. Sykes and her family own a ranch in West Texas where the Comanches once lived.
