Name: Lois and Arn Hart
City of residence: Berthoud
Occupation: Philanthropists; Lois: leadership coach; Arn: U.S. Air Force veteran, retired investment broker
How long have you lived in west Berthoud? What drew you to this area?
Lois: We’re going on our fifth year. We’ve moved a lot. We’re adventuresome. We have lived in several small towns, like Lyons. We were there for 10 years. At one point, we took a hiatus for a couple of years up in Montana just to try out a new place, and we knew we were going to come right back here. Polson, Mont. was little. The atmosphere is so different than in the suburbs or in big cities. We never really stayed in big places. You’re able to meet the leaders [in small towns] and actually communicate with them quickly because there are a lot of people. We have a sense of great pride here in this town, as we did in other small towns.
Arn: We’ve lived in Longmont, Lyons, Fort Collins and Loveland up at Centerra, but we like small-town living because when we got to the Front Range back in the late ’70s, there were only half as many people as there are now. The country feel, the small-town feel, is really very attractive. Plus, we love our Eagles and the horses running around. It’s a perfect setting to be peaceful as we seem to continue getting older.
Tell us about your background.
Arn: My family was from northern N.Y. My dad had to drop out of school in eighth grade and still ended up being an executive in New York City. I grew up in Greenwich, Conn., and I went to Cornell. There were only a few of us who qualified for flying training, so I ended up going into the Air Force for eight years as a B-52 radar navigator. After a couple of years over Vietnam, I decided for the sake of my longevity that I might better do something else. And it was fun. It’s great fun flying when you’re young, but we had missions where some of them were 25-and-a-half hours in the air, and that gets to wear you down. After a little shuckin’ and jivin’, I became an investment broker for 20 years. I had been talking to somebody out in Colorado who we eventually visited, and we said, “This is how we have to live.” I moved out here, and I worked for Betcher and Prudential. Then in 1995, we retired to run our own money, and we started working more and more with the various nonprofits, which has been great. I try and make the money, and Lois helps meet the people to decide who’s doing a good job. So I did a lot of flying, and I did a lot of work in the investment business, and I enjoyed every minute of it. My ambition was to have as much adventure as I could without getting killed, and I cut it very, very close.
Lois: I listen to all of his stories because I was not with him when he was in the military. It’s fascinating to learn about that. I grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., and it was a good family. We were all in Scouts and in church. They were good parents for me to model after. I lived in Rochester and had two children with a previous husband, then [Arn and I] met through some friends and neighbors, and we got married in Syracuse. I followed my grandmother: She was in a one-room schoolhouse as a teacher, and my mother was a teacher in the ’30s, and when they got married, they lost their jobs. That was before the women’s movement came along and made a difference. I experienced the women’s movement of the ’70s, and one of the things that we started to believe again was that we could really do anything. We were breaking the glass ceiling. So I was a teacher, and I thought, “Well, maybe I should move up into administration.” I had studied for my doctorate in leadership development, so I’ve always been very interested in my own opportunities to be a leader. I’ve been a leader in a lot of ways; over time, it seems like whatever I join, I end up with some kind of leadership position.
What organizations do you donate to? What is your process?
Arn: The NoCo Foundation is our base organization, and from that, we go to NOCO Humane, Animal Friends Alliance, Project Self-Sufficiency, Alternatives to Violence, RAFT—that’s our rural transportation here in Berthoud—and others.
Lois: We came to Colorado, and I expanded my involvement of interest in leadership, and people came to me. I don’t advertise that I’m willing to help them at the leadership level, but the word gets out, and networking kind of happens. The right people are ready to improve their effectiveness as leaders, and that’s what I expect if you’re going to be serious about it. So I do a lot of one-on-one coaching with executive directors, and I’ve worked with the boards. Our house was planned for groups: There’s a counter where we host larger numbers of people, and there’s a dining room where strategic planning has been done with agencies. It’s such a joy to facilitate them, to learn how to be even more effective in their work. What happens, naturally, is that I work with a group, and Arn is not present—he’s either in his office or I’m at their office—and I will tell him the story of what we’re working on so he gets familiar with him. We often have people here because I want Arn to also meet them. As a result, most of the agencies we’ve worked with here in the Northern Colorado area are ones we have become donors for, and it helps to have gotten so well acquainted and understand their need.
Lois: The other thing that benefits the agencies we’re working with is the fact that I work with so many different agencies in the area. When something comes up, I can say, “You might want to talk to Judy at NOCO Humane; this is what she’s doing that you might want to talk to her about.” Or I will give examples of other ones and how they’re dealing with things.
Lois: A lot of our focus as philanthropists is to encourage others to donate time and money as they can. We like to tell our stories of some of the things we’ve learned about and done and why we particularly love them. Some programs, like the RAFT program that benefits us in our fire district here, [benefit us too because] we’ve had fires right over here.
Arn: It really started up in Polson big time because, first of all, it’s a lovely town at the south end of Flathead Lake, but there’s only 5,000 people, so there’s a few people who have to do everything. We were approached by some friends who said, “Let’s start a community foundation.” That was in 2006, and we started at ground zero, and it’s well over a couple million dollars now. We learned a lot because the state of Montana was very helpful in sending us to seminars, and they gave us bonuses for various things we did and accomplished. It really gave us an inside look. When we came back here, we were really all set to get going big time with the NoCo Foundation, which is another really well run, wonderful organization.
What led you to donate defibrillators to the Loveland and Berthoud fire departments?
Lois: Our contact came for lunch, and she said to me, “I wanted to tell you about something, partly because your name is Hart,” and second to that was that I had a heart condition three years ago and had some stints put in. They wondered if we might make a donation to get some more defibrillators to put in our fire rescues. I said, “Yes, that would be a good idea.” When we agreed to donate the defibrillators to Loveland’s fire department, I called up the fire chief and said, “We won’t just give them to Loveland; we want to give them to Berthoud too because this is our hometown now.” And of course they agreed. I had the joy of interviewing them to find out what would be involved. Defibrillators are now in all the vehicles—there might even be a station wagon carrying one that supervises them when they’re going to the fire—so they have a variety. We made sure that each of them got enough defibrillators to complete their whole fleet. After the fact, we were honored by them at their place, and we were in the paper. That spread the word, which was good for them and for us to be able to encourage other people that this is a worthy cause.
Arn: That was through the McKee Wellness Foundation when Kara Pappas was a dear friend. She’s the one who approached us.
We’ve heard that you’re planning on donating your home as a legacy gift to the NoCo Foundation. What made you decide to do that?
Lois: It’s a beautiful home. We believe in them so much, and we don’t have anyone to leave it to anyway, so why not?
Arn: The way I look at it is that this is a wonderful way to take an asset that can be turned into a pool of money that will last indefinitely. We had started out with donations that came when Section 8 housing projects had matured: I was either going to pay a lot of taxes or give to charity. So that got us into it, but now we can really have a significant amount, like our own little community foundation, to carry forward. Our kids are already in their ’60s and so on, and we see so much need in this beautiful Front Range of ours, and Northern Colorado, that if we can keep it going…even in this wonderful, rich area, there’s a whole lot of people who have big problems.
Lois: Every year, we make a list of our current favorite agencies that we support, and when we die, the final list, the most current one on file, they will take a percentage of the liquidity and divide it among those people. The same amount will be given to those agencies because there will always be some money available. That’s quite amazing. From heaven, we’ll be smiling.
If you were showing someone around Northern Colorado for a day or weekend, what would you take them to go do?
Lois: First of all, we’d invite them to this home. We call it “Hart Haven” because we have a view of the mountains and the eagles. I would say our local museum: It has a very interesting history, and it’s right on our main street.
Arn: I’ve got one that not many people would mention. It’s the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District. They are a very important part of Northern Colorado, and I learned about them when I got on the board of the Lupton Bottom Ditch when we lived out by the South Platte River. They put on wonderful training programs for those of us who were trying to run and maintain the ditches, and they have managed the water of Northern Colorado so well that even after what has been explosive growth, somehow we still have enough water. They have a beautiful building right here in Berthoud and a garden and a little wooded picnic area that is just lovely. They’ve just finished off a big addition that you can look at inside as well. For people who live in Northern Colorado, the more they can learn about water, the better off everybody is.
Lois: Another museum is actually a part of our fire department. They renovated a beautiful vehicle, and they leave the door open, so when you walk on the street, you can see it. You can go inside as well.
What are your summer plans?
Lois: I have a big, big garden. I have a couple hundred plants, and that’s what I have the most fun doing. Yesterday I was working with my landscaper, starting to get things ready, and it’s so wonderful to see the new growth that’s coming up. We had a hailstorm last year, so I didn’t know if a lot of them would survive. I take walks with my dog on the paths in the garden—you see different things in a botanical garden on both sides—and we’ve been looking down at all the plants, Bella and I, and seeing more and more growth. I come inside and say, “Hey, guess what? There’s even more growth coming.” We’re looking forward to it this year.
Arn: Of course, we’ve had to cut our activities due to our physical abilities. For 30 and 40 years, we had places up in the mountains, and we’d ski all winter, and we were backpacking and hiking, and eventually we also had trailers and went all around every inch of Wyoming and Montana and Colorado. But even our park in south Loveland is a wonderful place to have some fun. We go up to Carter Lake, and it’s always a nice, fresh morning up there in the mountains in the summertime. With occasional trips out to our little soirées for the nonprofits, that’s about all we can handle anymore. We recommend that you young people get out there and get moving as long as you can because your legs will give out after a while. No getting around it.
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