Donna Cole said she wasn’t sure how she’d have time to be the president for the Rotary Club of Batesville.
However, after talking with her boss, Cole decided to go for it.
“This was humbling,” said Cole, 50. “Maybe I sit back and wonder if I’m doing what I should be doing as a citizen. Am I doing what I should be doing as a person on this Earth, as a citizen of this country and a citizen in this community? When someone looks at you and says, ‘I want you to lead this group,’ that was humbling, and it still is. It’s a good feeling. It’s a huge responsibility, and I take it very seriously.”
Josh Kemp, Cole’s boss at Ozark Information Services in Batesville, told her to take the position and gave her his full support, she said.
“I sat down with Josh, and I mentioned to him what I was asked to do,” Cole said. “He said, ‘Of course you want to do that.’ I was concerned that it was going to take away some more time here at work. I’m going to have to figure out how to manage that. I’m not sure how I’m going to fit that in with everything else.”
Kemp said he had asked Cole to join Rotary because he was traveling a lot with his company and wasn’t able to spend a lot of time with it.
“I thought it would give Donna several things,” he said. “It would help her get more familiar with the people in the community and an opportunity to give back. Also, she would be able to learn to communicate with a large group of people and just get to see what can be done in the community from a business perspective as well.”
Kemp said Cole has what it takes to do well as president.
“She’s a can-do person,” he said. “She’s very capable. She’s good with people, and she has a lot of energy. She can get things done.”
Cole was asked by former Rotary Club president Dennis Moore to be his successor.
“When he asked me if I would follow him as his president elect, I was shocked,” she said. “I laughed a little and asked if everyone else turned him down. He looked at me and said I was the very first person he thought of when he started planning the leadership.”
“Then I thought, ‘Maybe I can do this,’” she said. “I told my kids about it. They thought it was pretty cool. I don’t think they understand the full meaning of it, but here I am. I decided to take the plunge. I’m learning how to put it all in with all my other things I’m involved in.”
Additionally, Cole is a member of the Independence County Library Friends Foundation.
“We raise funds for the library so it can do all its great classes and projects for the community,” she said. “That’s an honor as well. It just started a few years ago, and I got in on the ground floor with it.”
Cole said all of her community work meshes together well.
“Being a part of the Rotary, working in the Friends Foundation — it all just falls together,” she said. “It’s all service. It’s going where you’re needed and trying to fill a spot if there’s one there. If there’s a need, let’s figure out how we can fill it.”
Cole was born and raised in Batesville. She graduated from North Arkansas Christian School, a former private school in Batesville, in 1987. She earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Harding University in Searcy. She taught one year at a private school in Helena before moving back to Batesville.
“I wasn’t able to find a full-time teaching job here,” she said. “I subbed for two years in all the surrounding schools, including Newark, Batesville and Southside. I ended up needing a full-time job, and a full-time job landed in my lap to work at a local home-health agency.”
She worked there for four years before going to work at Stephens Inc., an investment banking company in Little Rock, in November 1999.
“I worked there until 2006, when I received a call from my former boss in Batesville,” Cole said. “She had several staff changes coming up and wanted me back. I took the plunge and got back here. This is where my parents and my brothers were. My dad was not in the best of health. I wanted to get back closer to family.”
While she came back because of her parents and her children wanting to be close to their grandparents, Cole said, she enjoyed working at Stephens.
“It was a very difficult decision because of my career,” she said. “Not being exactly a career-driven person, I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the people. I enjoyed what I did. I enjoyed learning all those new things with investment banking. It was very interesting. I learned something new every day. It stayed fresh. I saw a place where I could move up and move forward.”
While she may no longer be a teacher, Cole said, education runs in her family.
“My dad has been at an elementary school for 30-something years,” she said of her father, Paul Garner. “They knew him. Education was in my blood. My mom, Mary Garner, was the bookkeeper for the Batesville Schools for over 30 years.
“It was a difficult change to make, but when you need a full-time job and good insurance and benefits, you go where you have to go. That’s what started me down that road. Going back into education just never came up.”
Cole eventually went to work at Ozark Information Services in 2012, and Kemp was a member of the Rotary Club.
“He was getting busier, and he started inviting me to go the Rotary meetings with him,” she said. “He said he didn’t know if he could continue to commit a lot of time to it. He asked if I’d be willing to join Rotary, representing our company, and let him step back. I said, ‘Sure, why not?’”
Cole said she wasn’t sure what she was getting into with the Rotary Club.
“One can tell you when they join and a few years after they’ve joined, their whole perception will change of what it really is and means,” she said. “It came from ‘Yes, I can go and represent our business, and I can meet new people’ to now two years later, realizing the scope of what Rotary is, not just here, but in our local community. It reaches so far past our boundaries. I don’t think we’ll ever know how far-reaching Rotary goes.”
Some of the projects that Rotary helps with internationally include clean-water projects in lesser-developed countries.
“Rotary reaches beyond our borders in places where politics and government can’t get to,” she said.
On a local level, the Batesville Rotary Club tries to find ways to help the community, she said.
“Most years, we have some set things that we like to do,” Cole said. “We do a couple of fundraisers, and that’s just to fill the coffers. We do our scholarships, $500 for each school in the area.”
Those schools include Batesville, Southside, Midland, Cedar Ridge and Cave City.
“We reach out to all those schools and ask the students to apply for scholarships if they are gong to be attending college the next fall,” she said. “We get all the applications, and we grant a scholarship for one person from each school.
“It’s something that we can give back to our high school seniors who are graduating and going out into the world.”
Another project is RYLA camp, which stands for Rotary Youth Leadership Awards.
“Our Rotary district puts this on every year at a camp in Maumelle,” Cole said. “We try to sponsor however many who want to go for 10th- and 11th-graders in the area.”
Cole said the club transports the attendees back and forth. Three times in a row, Cole said, she’s picked up the students from the camp and taken them home.
“The students find it so rewarding,” she said. “It changes some of these kiddos. It amazes me how they want to talk about it all the way home. They are exhausted but find it a very rewarding experience that gives them a little oomph to go back to school.”
Additionally, the Batesville Rotary Club supports the United Way with Best Foot Forward, Stuff the Bus and Coats for Kids.
“We always try to help with those types of fundraisers,” Cole said.
And a big project the club facilitated was to help the Independence County Sheriff’s Office get new equipment.
“Sheriff Shawn Stephens was mentioning how his budget was very tight,” Cole said. “We all know that’s a big deal, as far as officers having what they need to be protected. He mentioned that they had some body cameras that were not functioning properly, and they needed to get new ones.”
Cole said the Rotary Club discussed how to help him.
“It was decided it was time to do something about it,” she said. “Last year, that was a great thing our club did. We stepped in and were able to obtain some grant money from our Rotary Foundation. We wanted to raise the other half. We raised a lot more than that. That wasn’t just our club, but our community. Our community stepped up to the plate.
“[The Sheriff’s Office] was able to get everything it needed. That was a big deal.”
Staff writer Mark Buffalo can be reached at (501) 399-3676 or mbuffalo@arkansasonline.com.