Mitzi Reynolds, who once introduced herself to a Faulkner County Leadership Institute class as a “professional volunteer,” was honored by the organization last week with the Dan Nabholz Award for her dedication to the community.
The 60-year-old said she was surprised because she’s really “winding down” after decades of serving on boards and committees.
The business manager at Antioch Baptist Church in Conway, she is a founding member of the Conway Regional Women’s Council and still serves on the steering committee.
“That one I like because it’s educating women about their health. We think we know, but we don’t,” Reynolds said. She helped create Dazzle Daze, the Conway Regional Health System’s annual fundraiser, 14 years ago.
“It’s grown into a fun event. We’ve raised $500,000,” she said. This year’s three-day shopping event will start Thursday.
Reynolds’ passion for the Faulkner County Leadership Institute never waned, she said, and she served on the board for 10 years and spent 3 1/2 years as its director.
Lori Scroggin, chief development officer for the Conway Regional Health System, said in Reynolds’ introduction at the Faulkner County Leadership Institute recognition banquet that Reynolds’ “fingerprints are all over this community and the many lives she’s touched.”
Reynolds, whose family moved from Georgia to Conway when she was in the sixth grade, met her husband, David, when they sat together in study hall and commiserated about their love lives. They went to a homecoming dance one year as friends, and they started dating not long afterward, she said. They were both 19 when they married. She started to the University of Central Arkansas in Conway and majored in business, but David was going to law school at night, and she needed to work.
She got a job at First State Bank and Trust of Conway, now Bank of America, in 1974. The bank encouraged its officers to be involved in the community, and she was an officer for 15 years of her 22-year tenure there.
“I was over the bookkeeping and customer-service area, so it was really hard for me to get out of the bank at first,” she said. “And we didn’t have cellphones then,” she said, laughing. “Once I got into the marketing department, we had a lot more leeway to get out of the bank.”
Reynolds’ first volunteering experience was in 1991, serving on the now-defunct City Beautiful Committee of the Conway Area Chamber of Commerce.
“It was a fun committee because we got to judge people’s yards in the summer and Christmas decorations,” she said. “It was really fun, so the next time they called about another committee, I said, ‘Sure.’ That’s how it started.”
She served on the Toad Suck Daze Committee, managed the festival store and served as treasurer. She was a member of the Junior Auxiliary, starting a project called Hope Chest, which funded boxes of household supplies for women when they moved out of the Women’s Shelter of Central Arkansas.
Reynolds decided to apply to be in the Faulkner County Leadership Institute class.
She didn’t expect to learn much.
“I’d lived here since I was 11 years old. I thought I knew everything about Faulkner County and what everybody did. When I went through the leadership class, I did not know everything about this town and county. It was so enlightening learning about the needs,” she said.
She is a graduate of the 1996 leadership class, and the Dan Nabholz Award is given each year to recognize the community contributions of a leadership-institute graduate. She also left the bank in 1996 as assistant vice president of marketing.
In addition to community organizations, Reynolds was an involved mom through the years, too. She and David had their son, Aaron, during David’s first year of law school, and Lauren was born eight years later. Both children played soccer, and Reynolds was president of what was then the Conway Soccer Club.
That’s when she found out how friendly the residents of Conway are compared with other cities, she said.
“When I was president of the soccer club, we started talking about getting our own fields,” Reynolds said. “One thing that made us want to do that was to bring people to Conway. We went to tournaments all over the state, and some of [the towns] weren’t friendly. Conway is just a really friendly town; people will do anything they can to help you.”
In 2003, Reynolds went to work for the United Way of Central Arkansas as its part-time campaign coordinator, “and United Way is all about the community,” she said.
“I went out and spoke to every business. I remember going to factories at 11:30 at night to talk to third-shift people,” Reynolds said. Sometimes after those meetings, she’d go sleep for a few hours and go back out early in the morning to catch another group of workers to make her plea.
Her United Way efforts transitioned into a full-time position, and Reynolds said she knew how much time it would take, so she quit.
Reynolds immersed herself in community activities, including serving on the board of the Women’s Shelter of Central Arkansas and volunteering in parent-teacher organizations, where she served as treasurer. She also served as a member of the city of Conway Parks and Recreation Advisory Board for five years.
In 2006, she got a job with a company doing confidential research in Faulkner County school districts and day cares, Conway Regional Medical Center and a hospital in Little Rock about child abuse.
“They didn’t give us names, but they would fill out reports to get an idea about how much child abuse was going on,” she said. It was a six-month stint, and the company wanted her to take a full-time position. It would have required weekly travel, and she wasn’t interested in that, she said.
Reynolds tried to find a part-time job, but when potential employers saw her resume, she said, they shook their heads.
“They said, ‘You’re overqualified — you won’t be happy,’” she said, no matter how much she tried to persuade them otherwise.
“I prayed about it and said, ‘Lord, if I’m supposed to work, you’re just going to have to dump a job in my lap,” she said. “It wasn’t even 24 hours later” when Jason Aultman, then associate pastor of Antioch Baptist Church, now lead pastor, called her, she said. He told Reynolds that a secretarial job was available, and she interviewed for it. Reynolds said she went home to discuss it with her husband. “I said, ‘David, I prayed about this. The Lord put this job right in my lap. I think I’d better take it.’”
She added financial duties a few months later, and just over a year ago, she became the church’s full-time business manager.
“Working here at the church, kind of our motto is worship, grow, serve — not just serve your church, but serve your community,” Reynolds said.
She volunteers as a greeter every other Sunday and staffs the office during Bethlehem Revisited in December, when the grounds are transformed into the city as it was during biblical times, and tours are given to the public. David Reynolds has performed as a character in the city, but now he helps his wife by providing meals for her office staff during those nights.
David, who retired as a circuit judge and is a district judge in Faulkner and Van Buren counties, is a 1998 graduate of the leadership
institute and received the Dan Nabholz Award in 2011.
Scroggin said Mitzi has lived up to her “lifelong philosophy to make things better than when she found them.”
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.