- July 19, 2025
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Don’t sleep on sleep.
That’s one small, albeit significant, takeaway from separate conversations with three of the most recognized and accomplished leaders in Sarasota.
Known to many in the civic, nonprofit and business communities by their first names — Larry, Roxie and Teri — the trio, at different times over the next 12 months or so, are all retiring. Asked one thing they are looking forward to in that next chapter, there was no hesitation: more sleep.
It will be well-deserved rest for Community Foundation of Sarasota County President and CEO Roxie Jerde; Charles & Margery Barancik Foundation President and CEO Teri Hansen; and Ringling College of Art and Design President Larry Thompson. I spoke with each in late May to talk about their accomplishments, leadership lessons, building trust and how they are approaching this next chapter.
Executive: Jerde, 72, announced her plans to retire from the Community Foundation of Sarasota County in June 2024. She was named CEO of the nonprofit in 2011, becoming the second leader after longtime CEO Stewart Stearns. Assets the foundation manages increased 173.68% during her tenure, from $190 million to some $520 million. The foundation has also doubled the number of funds it manages, from 811 to more than 1,580 during Jerde’s tenure. Jerde worked for JCPenney and Hallmark, before joining the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, where she was senior vice president for donor relations and education. With her last day at CFSC coming up soon, Jerde hosted a dinner a few weeks ago with every board chair she has worked for and with over the past 14 years and the search committee that helped hire her. “I had never been a CEO before,” she says, “and they took a chance” on someone in what became a “career capstone.”
Projected last day: June 30
Most impactful decision: Jerde says the early days of Covid involved several meaningful decisions. “That was uncharted waters for everybody,” she says. “No one here had done Zoom. We never even had Zoom hooked up.” Jerde says one big move was calling her friend Debra Jacobs, CEO of The Patterson Foundation in Sarasota, to get a conversation going about reactivating the Season of Sharing campaign right away, not waiting for the holiday season. That campaign raised nearly $2.8 million, then a record. And that year's giving challenge, in April 2020, raised more than $19 million, the highest of any of the nine Giving Challenge campaigns through 2024.
Building trust: Jerde has learned the best way to get buy-in and trust from your team is to admit mistakes — quickly. “When I screw up,” she says, “I fess up to it.” On the flip side, Jerde sought to create an atmosphere where employees weren’t afraid to admit to the boss they made a mistake. “I don’t want to be the CEO who only wants the good news,” she says.
What’s next: Jerde prefers to use the word preferment over the word retirement, because these are things she prefers to do. That list includes traveling with her husband Michael of 48 years. So much so the couple is headed to London July 1, the day after she retires. Jerde will be busy with other preferred things, like bike riding, reading and going to see her beloved University of Iowa Hawkeyes football games. She’s a foster parent to puppies — ask her to see videos and she excitedly scrolls through her iPad for a library of options — and an avid reader. One book on her next-up list is “There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift,” by Harvard Business Review Editor Kevin Evers. Asked what she will miss the most, she says the people. Asked what she's most looking forward to, it’s the sleep. “I am not a morning person,” she says, “and the working world doesn’t work for people who like to sleep in.”
Executive: Hansen, 68, has spent the past 23 years overseeing two community foundations in the area. She was president and CEO of the Gulf Coast Community Foundation for 13 years, from 2002 to 2015, when the Venice-based foundation awarded nearly $200 million in grants and initiatives. She was named CEO of the Charles & Margery Barancik Foundation in 2015, becoming employee No. 1. “They had a name, a board and they had money,” she says, “but they pretty much had nothing else.” Prior to those roles, Hansen — a San Diego native who was a public affairs officer in the U.S. Air Force — held leadership posts at The Cleveland Foundation, the Central Indiana Foundation and the Legacy Fund of Hamilton County in Indiana. In the last role, she was the founding president — an early stage role she says best fits her skillset, like at Barancik. “I’m not a gatekeeper CEO,” she says.
Projected last day: By March 31, 2026, or when successor is in place
Most impactful decision: The effort to turn a summer learning slide program into an entity called First 1,000 days Suncoast, led by funding from the Barancik Foundation, has had wide community impact. The program, which works with some 90 nonprofits in the area, helps “families during pregnancy and their child’s first 1,000 days of life, when 80% of child brain development occurs,” according to its website. “If you can’t get kids the first 1,000 days,” Hansen adds, “you’ll never be able to reach them.” The decision to support the initiative, as far back as 2016, was also impactful, Hansen says, because it showcases the foundation’s ability to not only build consensus and bring groups together but to lead through doing — not merely talking and meeting. “We made course corrections all along the way,” she says. “I’m a plan and execute leader, plan and execute, plan and execute. I’m not interested in doing reports for five or 10 years” and then executing.
Building trust: Hansen says being a dedicated active listener to her team of eight at the foundation is how she has built and sustained trust. Those employees, she says, have what’s basically their own book of business, and she trusts them to get the job done. “I hire experts and then let them run and do their thing,” she says. “I will tell them to go take that hill. I don’t tell them the time they need to be at the hill and how they’re going to take it when they get there.”
What’s next: Hansen seeks to be an active listener with her friends and social network in retirement. “I’m looking forward to being a better friend and relative,” she says. “There’s a lot of people who took a lot of time to take care of me through some (challenges.) Now I want to take care of them.” Like Jerde, the thing she will miss the most is the people. She won’t miss the long days and nights. “One thing I’m really looking forward to is getting some sleep,” she says. “I’ve been working since I was 15.”
Executive: Thompson, 77, is an anomaly in the world of college presidents: When he leaves Ringling, he will have been a college president for 27 years — nearly five times longer than the average college president tenure of 5.9 years, according to a 2022 survey from the American Council on Education. Thompson had a diverse career in arts-related posts before Ringling. Those roles include CEO of the Flint Cultural Center in Michigan and the founding director and CEO of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. He was also a special assistant to the president of The Ohio State University. Thompson was motivated by two separate but related themes for much of his Ringling tenure: to embrace the idea that the computer would become the next paintbrush and to shatter the myth of the starving artist. He has done that, to a large extent, through the school’s fast-paced growth track: Since 1999, Ringling has constructed 14 buildings on its main 48-acre campus; grown enrollment from 800 students to a record-high 1,722 students; and increased the academic offerings from the six original majors provided in 1999 to the 13 unique degree programs offered today. The school has 500 full-time faculty and staff.
Projected last day: May 2026 (end of academic year)
Most impactful decision: Thompson often tells his team that “curriculum drives enrollment, and enrollment drives everything else.” So a key move early on, he says, was to focus on academic programs. The college introduced a computer animation program a year or two before he arrived, a step he calls prescient. “The strategic decision I made,” he says, “is to work with the leadership team, and then the board, on attempting to figure out, how do we increase the size of the campus, and how do we diversify it? And then, how do we diversify the offerings that we have for students? We were able to build on (the computer animation program) and create other new majors that were also very technology oriented.”
Building trust: Thompson has built trust in his team by listening more and talking less. “A good leader is a very good listener who is silent, even if they know or think they know the answer,” he says, “because that helps others to develop, to think about an answer they may have, that may not be the same answer, which is very important.”
What’s next: Like his fellow almost-retirees, Thompson says the people — students, faculty and staff — are who he will miss the most. That, and “the energy and creativity on the campus. I'm just so impressed by the creative people and dedicated faculty and staff, and then also the dedicated students and how hard they work. It's a joy to see what is created here.” On what he is looking forward to, in the beginning it revolves around seeing grandkids, two on the east coast of Florida and one coming this summer, in Denver. “But the first thing I'm going to do,” he says, “is sleep a little bit.”
