School of life

It is ironic to say that not many people know Nancy Skinner Nordhoff. Her daily travels around South Whidbey are dotted with pauses to stop and chat with familiar faces. The meetings are punctuated with hugs, handshakes and words of kindness, and are often in the public places and spaces she has been creating on Whidbey Island for the past few decades.

She is a woman who, through family tradition and wealth, has become a civic minded philanthropist with a mission of bettering the Whidbey Island community, her hometown of Seattle, the Pacific Northwest, and at her alma mater Mount Holyoke College. Most notable in a list of contributions are the Hedgebrook Women Writer’s Retreat, the Goosefoot Community Fund, the renovated Bayview Cash Store, Langley Town Park, and her support of the Whidbey Writer’s Institute. She is a past president of the Seattle Junior League and if you type her name into an Internet search engine you’ll find her on the contributors and past board members listings for a dozen others.

So much for anonymity.

Nordhoff has also contributed to her alma mater to help fund scholarships for talented students, to fund the school’s new Center for the Environment, as well as other wide-ranging programs to ensure the school remains diverse and inclusive.

“It’s one of the most important things I’ve done,” Nordhoff said of her endowment to the college.

To her, her deeds are never done.

“A lot of people have ideas, the thing is acting on it,” she said.

She is a woman whose drive is undying and whose selflessness is unparalleled. She doesn’t take credit. To her, she is but a small piece in the creation of a better world community in which we live.

“It discounts so many other pieces of a project when they just look at me,” she said. “There’s a huge pot of resources that includes skill, time, craft, finances and everything it takes to complete a project — the pot is too rich to pick out just one.”

On May 23, on the eve of her 50th college reunion, Mount Holyoke College bestowed her with an honorary doctor of humane letters degree at the school’s commencement ceremonies.

In presenting the degree, Mount Holyoke president Joanne Creighton called Nordhoff a philanthropist and volunteer extraordinaire.

In her remarks, Nordhoff encouraged the graduating class to be careful with their choices — not only the major decisions, but everyday decisions about dropping a coin in a panhandler’s cup, or sitting next to a stranger, or being seen in public in support of an unpopular cause.

“The every day choices help you create the meaning of your own life, not from outside of you, from the mirror, from yourself,” she said.

Born into philanthropy

Nancy Skinner grew up in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of Seattle, the youngest daughter of three children to Winifred and Gilbert Skinner. Her parents and their parents before them come from a long line of business minded philanthropists. They were shareholders, board members and major contributors for companies whose products ranged from lumber to cola, energy to transportation, ship building to banking.

Bring up the family name of Skinner and people somehow find the name to be familiar.

Her grandmother, Jeannette C. Skinner, was one of the founders for “Children’s Hospital.” Her grandfather, Edward Skinner, helped pave the road for business in Alaska. Her brother, D.E. “Ned” Skinner is widely credited as a major contributor to the betterment of Seattle during the 20th century. Among his notable acts, he helped create the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and, in part, funded the restoration of the Fifth Avenue Theatre.

Nordhoff’s sister, Sally (Skinner) Behnke, is active with the Hearing Speech and Deafness Center and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

“We have our three different areas of influence,” Nordhoff said of her siblings.

But with wealth, her family came with inherent problems. Nordhoff grew up in a self described broken home, with alcoholic parents who divorced by the time she was five. She considers herself “pretty damn fortunate.”

“All that family stuff didn’t destroy who I was,” she said “If anything, I learned to understand the disease of alcoholics. It hasn’t left scars that you can see.”

Nancy grew up living with her mother, a career volunteer who was constantly active. She remembers helping her mother, who was one the treasurer for Children’s Hospital, sort through pennies for the monetary drives famously held during the Great Depression.

“I can still remember sitting down and wrapping them into 50 cent rolls or whatever it as at the time,” she said.

She didn’t do exceptionally well in school while attending St. Nicholas girls school, and crammed her time full of classes and sports.

“I spent high school trying to have fun,” she said.

On her volleyball team she practiced her future organization abilities.

“Back then we had nine players on the court and I would spend hours working on our rotation,” she said. “It was all about looking at our best players and figuring out who was best at what position and how we could get the most out of everyone.”

After high school she headed cross country to attend Mount Holyoke College, a renowned all women’s institution in South Hadley, Mass, where she majored in chemistry.

“I’m very analytical,” she explained of her field of study.

After graduating from Mount Holyoke in 1954, she followed the family footsteps and dove into a life of working with organizations and non profits. She helped fundraise, organize, contribute and rally the troops.

She also decided she wanted to set out to do something no one else in her family had done. She earned her pilot’s license and between 1955 and 1957 she flew a single engine Piper Tripacer back and froth across the country during the infancy of her philanthropy work.

“It was another experience,” she said. “I wasn’t very daring.”

In 1957 she met Arthur Nordhoff, son of the founder of the Bellevue Airfield, whom she married and shared 30 years of her life. The couple raised three children — Chuck, Grace and Carolyn. Nordhoff said because of her own childhood, she felt handicapped at being a parent herself.

“The best thing I could figure to do was send them out into the world as soon as I could,” she said.

This led to a rift between mother and children that has taken time to heal. Now with 10 grandkids, it’s a second chance.

“As a grandparent you have to figure out how to be present in each one of their lives,” she said. “You have to find that something.”

A turning point

At age 50, Nancy Skinner Nordhoff resigned from every volunteer, fundraising and organizational position she held. She bought a van and traveled the country. Her mid-life crisis circled around identifying with herself and identifying her place in the world.

“I’ve had to break the feeling that you have to carry what your family wants you to do,” she said, “I realized I could create for myself the things I found important.”

Out of this realization and her sabbatical was born Hedgebrook, a women’s writing retreat in Freeland.

Since 1988 Hedgebrook has welcomed more than 800 women ranging in age from 17 to 82 from countries all over the world to continue thee mission of ensuring the most unheard women voices are heard.

“I still fully believe we need to support women’s voices,” she said.

Nordhoff has gotten involved on other high-profile but local philanthropic projects. Her Goosefoot Community Fund, founded in 1996, has provided $2.5 million in loans and technical assistance to Whidbey Islanders, 25 units of affordable housing and is almost finished with the first phase of the redevelopment of Bayview Corner.

“Something spoke to me about this place,” she said of the old Bayview Cash Store. “It was ripe for someone to bulldoze and I didn’t want to see it happen.”

To Nordhoff, buildings are like people.

“Destroying buildings parallels how we throw human beings away in this country,” she said. “They get old, you don’t know what to do with them so you bulldoze them.”

It’s a realization she comes to quickly, quietly shrugging her shoulders. Maybe it’s from her upbringing — maybe her family, she says.

Today, one of her greatest joys is heading to Las Vegas to play the slots with her daughters. She enjoys gardening and spending time with her partner of 15 years, Lyn Hays.

Her goals today are simple.

“I want to be a good person,” she said. “It’s nice to be at this stage in life with good health.”

Now in her 70s, Nordhoff is beginning to lay low on major projects. However, she continues to contribute, and already she has sown the seeds for future philanthropists in her children.

“She was always out to meetings, and now in our adult years we finally have understanding of the meaning of those meetings,” said her daughter, Grace Nordhoff.

Though fewer now, those meetings and Nordhoff’s continued giving still have meaning.

“My life is a simple story that in many ways became richer,” she said. “It’s about the whole thing — there’s a richness that has translated into happiness.”

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