Betsy Daley named SCA's first Executive Director

We feel sure that there isn't an SCA member of the last ten years who hasn't chatted with Betsy, asked a question of Betsy, depended on Betsy to get something done, or greeted her as a familiar presence at SCA events.

Fortunately, we can all continue to turn to her for a long time to come. At the end of August she accepted the post of SCA's first fulltime Executive Director. She was officially hired as of September 1, and was in SCA's makeshift office on the third floor of the Locktender's House the day after Labor Day, September 3.

The process of getting there was by no means a walk-in. The idea of adding to SCA's modest operating budget the expense of a professional manager of the caliber we needed was bold but scary. Last December we applied to The William Penn Foundation for a grant that would fund a little better than half of an Executive Director's salary and benefit expenses for the next two years. This would give us a big head start on the way to becoming fully self-sustaining at a higher level.

The foundation has been one of SCA's supporters since '97, and in June it awarded our asked-for grant of $60,000, to be paid in two annual installments.

With this boost, the next step was to make sure we hired the very best person available for the job. President Anthony A. Geyelin appointed a search committee, and ads were placed in newspapers and on the Internet. We received and carefully weighed a dozen
responses, including one from Betsy. We interviewed three candidates. The competition was tough but fair, and Betsy was the search committee's unanimous choice.

It's true that Betsy had an edge that the other competitors didn't have. She had already proved her extraordinary capabilities over the last five years. Her years as SCA president from 1997 through 2001 were the years in which SCA, whose biggest project before then had been to get a canoe launch in the river, was encouraged to play a large role in the state's effort to bring tourists to the newly designated Schuylkill Heritage Corridor.

For five years, and with the endorsement and help of the board, Betsy guided and supervised our new role. Plans were made to restore Lock 60 as a working lock, repair the dilapidated Locktender's House, and preserve the flow and integrity of the canal itself. During her presidency SCA was awarded nearly $1 million in grants for these projects and much was accomplished.

For Betsy this meant five years of working with engineers and architects, contracts and schedules, permitting agencies and grant-giving bodies, on top of such routine SCA matters as Canal Day, Open House programs and membership enrollment. She had a fulltime job in the administrative office of the Spring-Ford Intermediate School and she and her husband Dan were seeing three teenagers through high school and into college. She took time off from her job to consult with consultants and she spent her evenings going to inter-agency meetings or solving horrendous problems by telephone or e-mail. She spent her weekends dealing with the really major stuff.

She kept everything on course by expending prodigious amounts of time, using lots of common sense and paying lots of attention to details. And she did it all with unfailing patience and good cheer.

With that kind of record the search committee's choice was obvious.

No one knows better than Betsy where we've been. No one else has a clearer vision of where we're going. It's a very busy, construction-filled future ahead, but we have good reason to believe that, with the rest of us helping all we can, Betsy will get us there.