Pritchett announces plan to retire as CEO of Gulf Coast Community Foundation in 2023

VENICE – Mark Pritchett wanted to announce his retirement as president and CEO of Gulf Coast Community Foundation – which is effective sometime in 2023, after his successor is picked – as quietly as possible.

He envisioned an understated press release on July 11 and little fanfare.

Members of the board of directors wanted more, given that the 68-year-old Pritchett is only the fourth person to run the 27-year-old foundation.

In his 14-year tenure at what is now a $426.6 million foundation – the last seven as CEO – Pritchett has worked with a mindset that targeted philanthropy can spark positive community change.

'My goal now is to teach': Pritchett's forte is solving problems

That’s a vision Pritchett shared with his immediate predecessor Teri Hansen, who left in 2015 to run the Charles and Margery Barancik Foundation.

It’s also inscribed high on a wall in the Gulf Coast shared office space: “Together with our donors, we transform our region through bold and proactive philanthropy.”

To fulfill that, Pritchett said, Gulf Coast’s niche is attracting donors who want to be part of “a bigger solution to a bigger issue.

“This all goes back to 2010, where our board says we want to be less of a grant-making organization and more of a change agent for the better for our community,” Pritchett said. “That was why I was brought here in 2008, to begin that process of transforming this organization.

“My charge was to prepare this foundation for the next generation of philanthropists, to take the organization to a higher level in terms of deepening our relationships with our donors, to really emphasize our leadership model in the community through Jon (Thaxton, the current senior vice president  for community investment) and his work and to build the infrastructure of this organization so we’re ready for the next 10 to 15 years.”

Building on the framework Hansen established, Pritchett oversaw a nonprofit that has added roughly $373 million in new gifts since he became CEO.

In Pritchett’s tenure, Gulf Coast has awarded more than $300 million to area nonprofits. Since 1995, when it was created as the Venice Foundation with seed money from the sale of Venice Hospital to Bon Secours Health Systems, Gulf Coast and its donors have invested more than $489.2 million in the community.

“Working with our region’s strong and transformative nonprofit organizations, we have collaborated and innovated to support thousands of lives,” Gulf Coast Board Chair David Green said in a prepared statement. “We have preserved land and waterways, celebrated the arts, and provided resources to youth and families struggling with mental health.

“We have and will continue to transform, together.”

“Great leaders empower,” he added. “Mark has empowered the staff at Gulf Coast and provided them with the guidance, tools, and support to serve this community well into the future.

“He is widely respected throughout Florida and we have been fortunate to watch him build an extraordinary leadership team and organization.”

Roots as a traditional foundation

Prior to Hansen and Pritchett, the entity now known as Gulf Coast had more of a traditional foundation mission.

In those early years, the Venice Foundation was operated by Jon Preiksat – the former chief legal officer of the hospital prior to the Bon Secours sale – who became its first CEO.

After he resigned in 2001 because of differences with the board over the foundation's direction, Judy Wilcox served as interim CEO.

A former founding Venice Foundation board member, Wilcox was intimately familiar with the way the foundation operated. She served until the CEO search led to Hansen, who had been vice president of gift planning and donor relations for the Cleveland Foundation.

Hansen had several missions, including expanding the foundation’s donor base beyond the original hospital endowment.

Pritchett was in his 13th year as executive vice president for public policy at the Collins Center in the fall of 2007 when Hansen heard him speak at a retreat in Venice.

By then Pritchett was a high-profile figure among state policy makers.

Pritchett had served as vice president of the Florida Chamber of Commerce from 1990 to 1994 and vice president of the business development group Enterprise Florida in 1994 and 1995.

As  executive vice president of the Collins Center,  Pritchett helped run a blue-ribbon panel for Gov. Jeb Bush on election reform, following the 2000 Presidential Election. After the 2004-05 hurricane seasons, he oversaw the Collins’ Center’s mediation program, designed to settle disputes between insurance agencies and customers.

Once she heard Pritchett’s entrepreneurial philosophy about solutions to community challenges, she saw him as the perfect person to oversee Gulf Coast’s grantmaking programs.

“Everything he said, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, if somebody could write a description of who I’m looking for, that’s who he is,’” Hansen told the Herald-Tribune in 2015.

He joined Gulf Coast in 2008 as its vice president for community investment and was later promoted to senior vice president in 2011.

Transformational initiatives

Pritchett led several key initiatives that were sparked by Gulf Coast’s philanthropy.

He was the founding co-chair of the CareerEdge workforce training program – which started during the Great Recession – and helped train thousands of local workers.

With philanthropists Charles and Margery Barancik, Pritchett led a team that founded STEMSmart, a 2010 initiative that gave more than 300 middle school classrooms access to technology that helped reshape how math, science, language arts and social studies are taught.

In 2014, Pritchett created an Arts Appreciation grant program that provides unrestricted funding to 13 area arts organizations.

Gulf Coast’s 25th anniversary celebration in 2020 highlighted the environment – specifically the waters – though it was also impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Earlier: Sea turtle sculpture encourages recycling

In response to the economic impact of COVID-19, Gulf Coast and the Charles and Margery Barancik Foundation teamed to create an initiative that raised more than $7 million, awarded to nonprofits involved with everything from food distribution and child care for first responders and health care workers to mental health care.

The foundation also doubled its Arts Appreciation grant program to help arts organizations make up for lost ticket sales.

Most of Gulf Coast’s high-priority missions bubble up from local need, such as the push for affordable and attainable housing, homelessness and improving the environment are home grown.

‘We’re not a foundation that takes something off the shelf and says … this is a popular thing around the country, we should try it here,” Pritchett said.

One of the best examples of that was the foundation’s funding of the Community Playbook for Healthy Waterways – spurred in part by a persistent red tide bloom along the Gulf Coast.

Earlier: Gulf Coast releases water quality playbook

Thaxton, the public face of the rollout of that online resource, cited that as one of several initiatives that should have been listed more prominently among Pritchett’s accomplishments, noting that as the CEO he should really have credit for everything.

At the same time, Thaxton acknowledged, that’s not Pritchett’s style.

“He’s been very deliberate and very strategic about his credit-sharing M.O. – it is pretty consistent,” Thaxton said. “Another thing, too, he expects that of others.”

Thaxton said that’s emblematic of the way Gulf Coast is built to operate.

“If you were on the inside, looking at the way that we operate, you would see that it truly is a team effort,” Thaxton said. “Our leadership team – during COVID, our leadership team met every single day  except for weekends – and we still meet at a minimum twice a week.”

“So the cross-pollination, the coordination and the assistance that each one gives another with Mark at the center of it, is routine. It is so much embedded in our DNA, it’s simply not extractable at this point.”

Leadership through philanthropy

Pritchett, a father of two, is proud of his first major initiative – a study of failures in Florida’s 911 system in the aftermath of the January 2008 kidnapping and murder of Denise Amber Lee.

“We found out when we did research that a lot of the mistakes were when the operator took the call and then transferred it to the dispatcher, there was a breakdown in communication – which training can help and sometimes technology,” Pritchett said.

That analysis helped Pritchett work with then-state Sen. Nancy Detert and other advocates to foster a statewide improvement in 911 operator and dispatcher training.

Pritchett worked with Nathan Lee, the widower of Denise, to support his creation of the Denise Amber Lee Foundation, which both advocates for nationwide improvements in the 911 system and offers training.

“He’s all over the country training people and telling the story and shining a light on the importance of communication – saving lives,” Pritchett did.

That initiative also validated the Gulf Coast model of community leadership through philanthropy.

“It showed you the impact of how a community foundation could have a national impact,” Pritchett said. “It opened our board's eyes to the leadership model and what we could do – that was a big one.”

A collaborative spirit

Pritchett, who received a PhD in education from Florida State University, after earning both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Kentucky, often tries to skip the spotlight. He prefers to work with a team and “push them out there.”

That collaborative spirit comes into play as Gulf Coast has sought out niches to foment change, without duplicating programs fostered by other area foundations – notably the Barancik foundation, the Patterson Foundation and the Community Foundation of Sarasota County.

For example, when seeking a niche to help with reading improvement for young students, Gulf Coast did not duplicate the efforts of those foundations and instead focused on children for whom English was their second language – typically in low-income schools – and falling behind as early as first grade.

“If you can get them up to grade level by first grade, when you hit that third-grade marker – which everyone says is critical – you’ve done something transformational for our kids and our system,” Pritchett said.

There are still several notable milestones for Gulf Coast, including the opening of a new, 3,000-square-foot Philanthropy Center at 1549 State Street in Sarasota later this year, helping a search committee find his successor and then helping that new person get settled.

Once that’s accomplished Pritchett is planning to spend time with family in Colorado Springs, where he spent his early childhood, explore some of his passions, such as cycling, astronomy and geology and spend time with his love, Gina Taylor.

“I've always enjoyed working, so this is going to be a real shocker,” said Pritchett, who started working at age 14, to help his single mom make ends meet.

Pritchett fibbed about his age to land jobs at both a restaurant and a paper route. “I have no consulting gigs, I have no plans other than to – after 55 years – take at least six months off and see what it’s like.”

Pritchett does have a solid idea of the qualities his successor should possess.

“It’s got to be somebody that understands public policy,” Pritchett said “It’s got to be somebody that understands the nuances of politics – we’re political but we’re not partisan; we can work with anybody that’s in power."

And the foundation needs somebody who understands the organization's nature, he said.

“We have a very trusting culture,” he added. “That culture is so important to our success – someone who can appreciate our culture and live out our values like most of us try to do every day.”

Earle Kimel primarily covers south Sarasota County for the Herald-Tribune and can be reached at earle.kimel@heraldtribune.com. Support local journalism with a digital subscription to the Herald-Tribune.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Mark Pritchett to retire as CEO of Gulf Coast Community Foundation