Mary Blake served as the director of the Sunset Empire Park & Recreation District in Seaside. During her time at the helm of the district, the swimming pool not only stayed open, it expanded. 

You can’t say Mary Blake doesn’t have vision: After all, when she started work as the general manager of the Sunset Empire Park & Recreation District in Seaside, the district’s main asset was a swimming pool facing the threat of closure.

But during her time at the helm of the district, the swimming pool not only stayed open, it expanded. The district also updated the community center and added a multipurpose synthetic turf field. It added a skatepark. The district now includes the Mary Blake PlayHouse, a community meeting place that was named in her honor as she retired.

It’s an impressive list. But Blake gives credit to Oregon Community Foundation for giving her the inspiration — and the tools — to dream even bigger.

The foundation, Blake said, has “so much value and they give you such insight and they are so supportive. … OCF is always there.”

The magic of water

Water holds a special lure for Mary Blake.

“If there is magic in this world, it certainly is found in water,” she said.

That helps explain why Blake, a competitive swimmer, spent a decade from 1974 to 1984 directing the aquatics program for the Portland Bureau of Parks and Recreation. She oversaw 14 community pools.

But the 1980s were years of declining government funding and rising fees for services like swimming pools. It rubbed Blake — who believes in the power of water to transform lives — the wrong way.

Pull Quote

“A lot of people thought I had just gone off the deep end, because I went from one of the biggest programs — not just one in the state, but the region — to a little swimming pool, and a little community.”

— Mary Blake

So, when she saw the job in Seaside open, she dove in.

“A lot of people thought I had just gone off the deep end, because I went from one of the biggest programs — not just one in the state, but the region — to a little swimming pool, and a little community,” she said.

In Seaside, she became the first female director of an Oregon parks and recreation special district. And the people who hired her bought into what Blake has long believed: “If there is only one thing that I could possibly have to make a difference in a community, from cradle to grave, it would be a public swimming pool. So I wanted to make that the best pool on the planet.”

She understood that a public swimming pool is “an investment in your community, literally from cradle to grave and beyond, because it carries through. Water is an equalizer. So you can start with a little one in the water. And then you can finish with a 103-year-old in the water as well, doing exercises and moving. So you keep moving.”

Blake certainly kept moving.

Once she and her colleagues successfully managed issues with the pool’s maintenance, she got to work on developing the district’s programs. In 1986, she noticed that Seaside Kids, a nonprofit that provides free sports programs to children, consistently got money from Oregon Community Foundation through the Lester and Sarah Louise Raw Seaside Youth Fund. (Lester Raw was a former mayor of Seaside.)

Blake wanted to know more about this Oregon Community Foundation, and started to write her own grant proposals to support scholarships for the pool’s instructional programs.

She got the grants.

And then, after three years or so, OCF started to ask her some intriguing questions: What are you doing to keep tabs on the recipients of the scholarships? Are you following their progress? What can you tell us about the outcomes of this program? Is it time to think about some leadership development for the district?

Blake still gets emotional thinking about that time.

“OCF has guided me on my leadership journey in a way that no other organization has,” she said. “And they also provided such soulful stewardship to help our Park and Recreation District meet our mission and vision — and that was simply to improve the quality of life through play for our communities.”

OCF helped with plans for an expansion of Sunset Pool, which today also features a warm-water pool and a hot tub along with its lap pool. (The pool also features a fitness center and a community garden.)

That was just the start. Blake gives the foundation credit for helping the district expand the community center and playing a big role in developing the community’s skatepark — a project, she said, that got its genesis in a campaign by a 10-year-old skater who believed Seaside needed such a facility.

“And so we just started building the case and working with the kids, and building the capacity with our funding,” she said. “And ultimately, the kids were going to City Council, they were doing presentations, they gave presentations to the state.” The state wanted to know where the skatepark project sat on the district’s list of goals — and who else was funding the project.

Oregon Community Foundation helped Blake answer those questions.

“It was because OCF helped me in the development of our strategic plan and mission and vision. And I was able to step back and say, ‘Yeah, we have $25,000’” — money that came from the foundation.

And that early investment from Oregon Community Foundation opened some doors.

“OCF really carried a great deal of weight in every place we went, not only with their participation but with their reach,” she said — and the foundation’s proven “ability to improve the quality of life in these rural settings.”

The foundation, she said, “was with us every single step of the way from our youth center, our pool, the senior center, the skatepark, all of the public parks.”

“Whenever we needed help, or assistance or training or connectivity or capacity building, we always checked in with OCF. … And they don’t just give out money, they come to your community, they look at the project, they talk to other people about how well you’re doing.”

And they keep asking questions, Blake said: “Are you doing the work? And are you learning from the work? And are you sharing that learning? And are you providing leadership, and not only to your organization? Are you sharing that?”

“It was just this breath of fresh air.”

Invitation to play

Mary Blake has given back to OCF since her retirement from the Sunset Empire Park & Recreation District: She has served on its North Coast Leadership Council. And she’s established a permanently endowed fund to support parks and recreation programming for young women and girls, and food and health programs along the North Coast for years.

Setting up that fund was easy, she said: “They came round to my house and we sat down and they said ‘Who and what do you want to help?’ … Now I have a little endowment with OCF. I’ve been so thrilled about it.”

And, as you might imagine, she encourages other people to check out the possibility of starting their own funds with OCF.

For years now, a quote from Plato has inspired Blake: “What then is the right way of living? Life must be lived as PLAY.” Blake has added an annotation: In her telling, PLAY stands for “Positive Leisure Activities for You … Play now and for a lifetime,” she said.

“People don’t realize how powerful that piece is,” she said.

It helped inspire the mission statement for the Sunset Empire Park & Recreation District: “Simply to improve the quality of life through play for our communities,” she said. “We wanted to invite people to play.”

Thanks to the work of Mary Blake — with plenty of help along the way from Oregon Community Foundation — people on the North Coast will be getting that invitation for many years to come.