Meet The Board: Mary Jo Rogers
If not for Mary Jo Rogers, New Directions as we know it, may have never existed. Executive Vice President and Chief Lending Officer at South Atlantic Bank, Mary Jo has been a part of New Directions since the beginning in 2013.
“Ed Jackson (Board Chairman of the former Street Reach Ministries and former New Directions Board Member) first connected me with Street Reach. I was the one that helped him build that building. When the idea began floating around about combining Street Reach, LifeLine, and the Center for Women in Children into one organization, Ed, Mary Jeffcoat (board member for Street Reach Ministries, former Myrtle Beach City Council Member and New Directions' Board Member) and Cookie Sprouse (former Executive Director of The Chapin Foundation) were brainstorming and somehow my name got brought up in the conversation. They came to me and said ‘Would you be the person that starts the board and starts the organization?’ So that’s how I got involved. I was at a point where I was able to do it, I had lived here long enough, and established connections… And homelessness was something that I always had passion for.”
As the founding chairman of New Directions’ Board of Directors, Mary Jo led the organization through some of its most formative years, beginning with the consolidation of multiple shelters into a single entity, establishing a “new direction” for how those experiencing homelessness were served along the Grand Strand.
“During the first couple of years, the board met at 7:30 in the morning… We met weekly for the first three months and continued to meet early in the morning bi-weekly, then monthly later on. That worked out really well for us…The first year or so we struggled a good bit with the financial side… the City of Myrtle Beach had to help us some, we had to do a lot of grant writing, and had to ask for a lot of donations from our community… It was a struggle because we were making changes and setting guidelines in place to get people to start helping themselves. That was our goal - not to give without any expectation or follow through, but instead, to give to help people really change… That was a challenge for our community to accept, but in the end we ended up winning their support after four to five years.”
Winning the support of the community for causes she is passionate about is something Mary Jo Rogers is well-known for. In addition to serving on New Directions’ Board of Directors, Mary Jo is currently a board member of the Myrtle Beach Downtown Alliance, a board member of One Grand Stand, and is past president of the Myrtle Beach Art Museum, Grand Strand Optimist Club, Better Business Bureau, and Kids Voting of Horry County. She is an alumnus of Eastern Carolina University, and a member of the faculty of the South Carolina Bankers School. Apart from her 30 years of banking experience and tremendous record of board service, she is perhaps best known in our local community as the 2020 Leadership Grand Strand Ann DeBock Leadership Award Winner (and a graduate of the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce’s Leadership Grand Strand Class XX).
Facilitating New Directions’ programming (and that of other organizations she is involved with) through governance, advocacy, and funding by serving on the board is, in her view, some of the most important and impactful work she does. “It’s amazing to see how we’re changing people’s lives… Just yesterday we housed ten people that had been living in a tiny little hotel room that smelled like feces, had no AC and only had one bed. And now that family is living at the Family Shelter where everybody gets a bed, everybody gets a bath, there’s places to play and kids for them to play with. When the kids walked in and felt the AC they were jumping up and down. They had been living in that hotel for months with a housing voucher. They hadn’t been able to find housing large enough for that many people. That’s a need in our community, that is going to take a huge effort from many partners working together. What we do in the interim makes a difference.”
The addition of the Family Shelter in late 2015 is one of New Directions’ most important organizational accomplishments, and one that Mary Jo is particularly proud of. “We worked for about two years on getting the Family Shelter to come into the fold. When we met with the board of Myrtle Beach Haven on the day that they made that choice to turn it over to New Directions… that was really one of the best days. To see Myrtle Beach Haven become New Directions for Families was extremely important to our overall goal of having shelters for men, women, and families with children in position… It became a pretty complete operation.”
Mary Jo’s tenure on board has been filled with both triumphs and challenges, including the difficult decision to restructure what was previously a domestic violence shelter into our current women’s shelter. “We had a lot of interesting transitions over those years… We felt really good when we first opened the domestic violence shelter. At the time we thought we were doing great work until we realized how many people we weren’t helping… It was a really hard decision to turn that facility from a domestic violence shelter to a women’s shelter, but because the rules say, to operate a domestic violence safe house, clients staying there have to be in danger… We had to turn away over 100 women in the first year. Most of them were not in danger, they just could not leave their abusers because they didn’t have anywhere to go… we received a lot of heat for that decision, but we were able to help so many more people by doing it.”
Both during her time as board chair and since, as a board member, Mary Jo has been a critical convenor of change within New Directions, overseeing the development of its core programming and service offerings, leading fundraising efforts, and developing key partnerships that have driven the success of the organization. Her vision for New Directions is ongoing, centered in a realistic optimism of not only what could be, but indeed, what should be.
“I’d love to see our new Women’s Shelter built. I’d love to see more women’s services established. Not having the space is the main problem. Do I think we can get there? I do - if we can get our partners to work with us to expand in a way that doesn’t enable more people to come and not be changed, but to instead be able to change more lives… I think when you get to a place where you’ve already got the best people that know how to do the job and move people forward, the future is having a more efficient campus where we can do more of that work and get more people off the streets and where they need to be.”
Through Mary Jo’s service on our Board Directors as its first chair (and now as a board member), a vision to be more efficient and effective in serving those experiencing homelessness in Myrtle Beach and Horry County was established, and has since grown into the organization we see today, complete with 5 facilities, 90+ partner agencies, 20 staff members, and over 1,200 served annually, all on a budget of just $1.29 million a year.
"I love what this place does… we’re very effective and efficient at what we do. If you look at our budget - it’s tiny compared to other organizations with our number of beds and level of programming. We are really good stewards of our funder’s money”. Mary Jo’s passion and experience continues to inspire and guide our organization through her service on the Board of Directors. We look forward to seeing how the vision she set into motion ten years ago continues to be fulfilled and share her hopeful optimism of not only what could be, but indeed, what should be.