Roxanna Mendez
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring you innovative insights from around the world.
Hi, my name is Roxanna Mendez, and I am your host today. I’m a student at Rice University, studying Architecture.
In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Shellye Arnold, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Memorial Park Conservancy.

Memorial Park is the largest park in the Houston Metropolitan area. The Conservancy plays a crucial role in managing the park. Shellye Arnold has dedicated over 10 years to the organization, witnessing firsthand the park’s transformation.
With the ongoing changes and new constructions in the park, I seized the opportunity to ask Shellye not only about her role but also about the process required for this large-scale transformation. Tune in to learn how funding was secured, the challenges faced in such a major public project, and the must-see attractions if you ever visit Memorial Park.

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Roxanna
What led you to the park Memorial Park Conservancy?

Shellye Arnold
So, I actually came out of a corporate career, I studied public policy, and ended up right out of graduate school in a management consulting role that led me to a career in the tech world in leadership positions. I really wanted to get back to public service, about 10 years before I got this role, sought to change my career and orient myself that way. But I didn’t really know how so I started volunteering, and related things. And that led to this. And so here I am, I’ve been in this role. 11 years this month. Wow. And that was after about a 20-year corporate career. I can say about a third of my career is this now at this point, which is really great.

Roxanna
So like, what do you do in your current role? And how do you feel in it, you know, being the president and CEO of such a large organization?

Shellye
Well, I have helped really evolve the ability of the organization to deliver on its mission. So, the organization that I came to, had a mission already established. And it was a very small organization with about three people and about a $300,000 annual budget. The organization was at a point because of the 2010 and 2011 drought, where there was a big outcry from Houstonians from the private sector, citizens from the public sector from, you know, elected officials and government officials to do something about Memorial Park, because at the time, you know, 2012 2013, they were seeing the death of 10s of 1000s of trees. And driving through Memorial Park was like driving through a funeral. And people wanted to do something. There was a real outcry and then a commitment from the public sector side, the mayor at the time, who was a nice Parker, and her team wanted to find resourcing, to address the decline in Memorial Park, that wasn’t just the trees, the park was declining, for decades had been in decline. It wasn’t just the ecology; it was the built structures as well. The concerns its approach was, we need to do a new master plan for the park. And the city’s approach was we needed to do a new master plan for the park. And they both committed significant funding. And so, the conservancy at that point, decided it needed to grow significantly, and become a professional organization, as opposed to a board led organization. And the city found a source of funding to put into and commit to the park. And so, to your question, my role is to evolve that mission, to work together to bring the resources the team, the people together, to define this master plan, listening to the public, listening to science and data, ecological listening to stories, histories, tell, listening and asking. And so informed by two years of research and asking, we formed a master plan. So, my first role was to help develop and deliver the masterplan while establishing an organization and then beginning to fundraise more aggressively, then. So, my role then became to build outreach into the community, relationships, credibility, trust, and, you know, build, and retool the organization. So today, we are a 75-person organization with about a six and a half million-dollar annual operating budget. And we are executing a $200 million capital program.

Roxanna
Yeah, it sounds like you’re putting all the moving pieces together to make the project advance.

Shellye
I’ll say I am one of many actually.

Roxanna
Yes.

Shellye
I’m the one speaking to you right now but I am one of many people, and that’s the key takeaway is, it takes many people to do something like this. And you have to be working hard to establish alignment and maintain alignment to kind of row in the same direction. And we do, we do that together. Well, first of all, we are a public park. We operate the park on behalf of the City of Houston. The city oversees our work overseas to make sure that we’re executing in accordance with the Master Plan intent, and to make sure that we are operating the park in accordance with our contractual requirements. And that’s to protect the public asset and that makes a lot of sense.

Roxanna
Yes.

Shellye
And then we have project partners Also at the Uptown Houston organization, which is a public entity as well. And then we have project partners at the Kinder Foundation. That is our largest donor. And they establish themselves as part of this as an oversight body along with the city. And so, there’s something called the Standards Committee. We all sit on it together to make sure that we’re rowing in the same direction and make sure that we are executing correctly.

Roxanna
Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of moving parts to this, you know, such a large-scale project definitely requires so many people. So, I’m sort of curious, like when you were entering this position was this 10-year plan already in motion?

Shellye
The 10-year plan started as a result of coming together of this partnership. Houston Parks and Recreation Department and the Uptown Houston organization. We were the first project partnership. We together, delivered the master plan in 2015. And that was after years of interviewing Houstonians. We had a survey that was online for three months. We had eight large public meetings that were around the city in different parts of the city, some were standing room only, some were just filled to capacity. We had some in Spanish, some in English. We had, I think, 20 workshops of folks who ranged from teachers to cyclists to runners, you know, all kinds of park users. So, we had over 3300 Houstonians participate in this master planning process. We had an ecology technical panel, where I asked the Sierra Club for help, because they were actually opposing us delivering this master plan.

Roxanna
Oh, wow.

Shellye
And so, I asked them, if that would help us. And what do you want? I think we have some shared objectives here in terms of advancing the ecological services function, and restoration of the park. And so, they helped that they gave me that list of people to bring into the panels. And so, we got this panel informing us for years during master planning process and all these other people that I mentioned. We hired stormwater management experts, we heard historian, we brought a history panel together, mostly volunteers. So, we had that. Then we had the master plan. So, the city approved the master plan in 2015, it became a city ordinance that was unanimously approved by city council. And then we started off on the work together. We started fundraising. At that point, the Kinder Foundation approached us. And so, we really decided together with our project partners, that they would join the effort with this catalyst funding of $70 million that leverage them another $50 million dollars from the city. And we committed $55 million on top of that, and then we agreed that together, we would seek $30 million of federal public funding. So that’s where over $200 million number comes from, to deliver 10 years’ worth of projects. The 10 years’ worth of projects became the 10-year plan. That happened in 2018. None of that was underway when I joined. When I joined, I joined to do these things specifically. I didn’t we didn’t have the words for 10-year plan, and we didn’t know how it was going to play out. But then when we all came together the four partners now the Parks Department, Uptown Houston, Kinder Foundation, and we, we defined 10 years’ worth of plans $205 million, approximately worth of capital investment, the operating plan for these projects, and then we started off together in 2018. And so, between 2018 and 2028, we’ll deliver 10 years’ worth of these plans.

In 2020, we delivered the 100-acre, Clay Family Eastern Glades and a sports complex. We opened those during COVID. At first the sports complex couldn’t be used but Clay Family Eastern Glades was like a lifeline to so many people.

In 2022, we fully moved the one-mile segment of the Seymour Liebermann Trail that runs long Memorial Drive, off of Memorial Drive. So, we take runners now and walkers, all the people that use it through the woods and over some ravines, over some bridges. It is really, really, pretty and no longer on Memorial Drive so you don’t have that danger on the street. It’s so much, it’s so much better experience.

In 2023, just a little over a year ago, we opened another 100-acre project called the Kinder Land Bridge and Cyvia and Melvyn Wolff Prairie. I know architecture students find that one very exciting.

Roxanna
Yes, we do.

Shellye
And then at the end of 2023, in November, we opened the two parts of a three-part running complex which has become quite popular, and then an event plaza that is a rental space for weddings and other functions. And soon we will open a new cafe and that’s the last part of the running complex. And then we will be on to our next project, which is likely to be Memorial Groves, which will be a third, 100-acre project. and to put that in context 100-acre park, that would be the 10th largest park in Houston. That will be the third one inside of Memorial Park. That’s a very special feature.

Roxanna
Yeah, that’s definitely a lot of work getting done on the park. So, I’m sort of curious, you mentioned community involvement. How did that help shape the final vision for the plan?

Shellye
It was and is really, really important. Before we even started design, we spent 18 months listening and asking, listening and asking. We were seeking input from any Houstonian that wanted to participate because this part is for all Houstonians. And so, we were treating it that way in terms of public input. It allowed us to understand what Houstonians wanted and didn’t want. For example, one of the biggest things that we heard was they wanted to keep the character of the park the same. And what evolved kind of as the character of the park was that it was this uniquely urban wilderness experience right in the middle of town, and an active recreation park, but also passive recreation. People didn’t want that to change. For example, what would change that would be to formalize the park. And so, for example, Hermann Park is a very formal European Park, it’s a wonderful park I grew up going to Hermann too. It’s a contrast to this park. So, they wanted Memorial to stay that way, urban wilderness, recreation. Another thing people wanted; a big request was access to the parts of the park they didn’t know. So, the parallel to that was safe crossings across Memorial Drive for people and animals. So those things all went together to inspire the land bridge, which became much more than that. But another thing people wanted, were gathering spaces, they didn’t feel that there were enough gathering spaces. And related to that was inviting places for families, for kids, for elder family members. There just didn’t feel like two people, there were those spaces. And really, there weren’t except in one area of the park. And that area wasn’t well served or well known. And so those were just some of the things that we heard. A lot of people did say they wanted their forest replanted, and then a lot of people would say, you know, they just wanted it healthier again. What the research led us to understand is that what we started off doing replanting forest, that’s what we started off doing. We even had signs that said, “Your forest will live again” on the road. That wasn’t intended to be. That’s not what nature wanted. And this park, we learned through the research was historically a native grassland, Gulf Coast prairie. Most of Houston land was this grassland prairie. That’s why we have farming and ranching. But what happened in Memorial Park, was that a lot of pine logging operation established itself in the 1800s here. And that’s why I became a largely pine forest in part. So anyway, back to your question, which was what did people want? They wanted their park to be healthy again. They wanted like decent restrooms. They wanted the trails repaired. There were very few requests for new things. But we did listen, we read every single response. And we did you know, the things especially that were the high focus areas for people that were the common requests, we did our very best to accommodate those. So that’s what you’re seeing.

Roxanna
Thank you so much. I think that was a closer look into how you know, community inputs affect these large-scale projects in order to like make it more for the people. You were talking about the landscape architects. So how did you approach hiring them? Was it through competition? Or was it an open call or another process?

Shellye
There was a group that was assigned to select the landscape architect. And it was a group that was comprised of people from the mayor’s office, people from the parks department and people from the conservancy. And people from the Uptown Houston organization. There were a couple of people that were really instrumental in identifying the best of the best of landscape architects that fit the criteria that we put in place. And so, the criteria were that they had experience managing, damaged or challenged ecology, so doing some ecological restoration, that they performed work, that was large scale impactful, visible globally, data science driven. So, what we didn’t want was a designer who was going to come in and bring just their ideas to the table and put their thumbprint on it everywhere and make it about their vision. This was going to be a vision that needed to be developed organically by asking and researching and looking to the future. So not just looking to the past, looking a lot to the past, to represent the past in the stories that the land would tell, but also to look to the future. And so, we had four firms that we brought into interview. And there were 10 or so people on this panel. They just narrowed it down to the final interviews, and Nelson Byrd Woltz strongly prevailed. And we’ve been very, very happy with their work. The other firm that we brought in that was very impactful is Lord Cultural Resources. They lead the public input engagement piece, and they lead the market research piece. We also talked to Steven Kleinberg, sociologist. We spoke with all kinds of folks as part of the market research work.

Roxanna
That’s great to hear, because I’ve seen the master plan, and it’s really beautiful and really great. So, it’s nice to know that was not only done by a good firm, but one that really takes into consideration that the people that it’s working with and working for.

Shellye
Oh, very much. And if I could, I’d like to talk a little bit about their approach that I’ve since learned one of the reasons that they are so distinctive in their work. In addition to listening, and asking, and researching, they think in terms of systems. So, let’s say we’re going to do a project. Let’s take the land bridge, for example, and prairie.

Roxanna
Okay.

Shellye
That was inspired by the need to cross Memorial Drive safely, animals and people. And that Memorial Drive, which is virtually a six-lane highway with a median bisected the park, 1500 acres, literally cut it in half. We kind of think of it as a wound as much as people love driving down Memorial Drive through the park. From the park perspective, it was a kind of a wound to the park for years. And so, the first idea was, Let’s heal this, you know, create these safe crossings. But then, because the research was done, and thoughtfully in terms of systems, all the work was done thinking in terms of systems. So, we ask questions like, how could the park absorb more stormwater? So how can the park be a better big green sponge? How can the park better absorb stormwater that will help the park itself because we lose so much land? It every time it rains and every time there’s a huge storm, it’s not good for the park, that millions of gallons of sheet water flow across the park. It’s not good for the city to have millions of gallons of floodwater flowing into downtown and into Buffalo Bayou Park. And so how can Memorial Park be a better steward to Houston? You know, how can it better serve Houston? And so, thinking about stormwater management is one of the systems that we looked at. And so, the projects that we created, the land bridge and prairie has 50 or 60 acres of prairie that is native grassland prairie that is the most, for our zone or region ecological zone, the most absorbent of stormwater compared to turf or trees. It’s also you think in terms of carbon dioxide, how can the park absorb more and sequester more carbon dioxide? The prairie does that better than any system in our area.

And then you think about like the soils and how to use the soils. We dug up 500,000 cubic yards of soil from around the land bridge to create a 10 feet down prairie and from the Eastern Glades Lake, we used them to create nature bridges. And so, we didn’t have to bring in 61,500 trucks of soil across driving down the freeways. So again, thinking in terms of systems and then cultural systems you can think of too. Demographics. We want to ensure that we are welcoming all Houstonians. Everyone comes and feels welcomed here, can afford to be here. We try to maintain everything or almost everything is free, that we manage or very low cost. So, half the parking is free, for example. Those are the systems we think in terms of.

Roxanna
That’s it’s really good to know I think you know all these systems that you’ve mentioned are sort of like addressing previous problems, and you’re trying to find a solution for them.

Shellye
And future problems.

Roxanna
Yeah, future problems as well.

Shellye
We anticipate more drought, more hurricanes, and more freezes.

Roxanna
I was just like thinking more of like, with all the solutions, but have you faced any unexpected challenges?

Shellye
Oh, yes. All the time. I think one of the hardest challenges we’ve had is growing an organization that fast. We were three people in 2013. We were nine people in 2016. And we took over managing 1100 acres of the 1500-acre park. But we did it and we did it because we have good partnerships. The people that we had are good people. Very committed, very talented, best of the best what they do. And in 2017, we had 20 people. So now we’re at 75. These are generally hard jobs, but they’re fun and challenging. The park itself presents unique challenges. I think if you can help ensure that some large percentage of people that they’re serving are happy, and I can understand why you’re doing what you’re doing and be inspired by what you’re doing. And that’s what a lot of people find here. They’re inspired by the work. We want people to come away better than they came into the park. Just better in some way healthier, happier, more connected, connected to other people connected to nature. Just better.

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Roxanna
I hope you found our discussion on Memorial Park’s 10-year plan enlightening. It is important to understand the large amount of effort behind the ongoing construction and revitalization of the park. It has certainly added depth to my appreciation of such projects. Hearing about the extensive input of community involvement that shapes these plans was particularly impactful. Next time you visit a local park, perhaps you’ll reflect on the considerable planning and community effort that contribute to its beauty and functionality.
Thanks for listening.

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