
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 6, 1992                   TAG: 9203060386
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NEW LEADER KNOWS WATER NEEDS

Mary Terry, who had a hand in creating the Virginia Water Project 24 years ago as a young trainee at an anti-poverty agency, next month becomes executive director of the seven-state organization based in Roanoke.

Terry, 45, was chosen by the project's board Wednesday from 126 applicants. Administrators from around the East Coast, many with more education and flashier resumes than Terry, vied for the job.

"There was a strong feeling on the board that Mary was by far the best," saidRobert G. Goldsmith, director of an Abingdon community action agency and president of the water project's 19-member board.

What set her apart, he said, "was her understanding of the needs of poor people in rural areas everywhere."

Terry long has been the project's financial administrator. She works closely with outgoing director Wilma Warren, who retires at the end of the month after almost 15 years in the job. Terry takes office April 1.

The non-profit Virginia Water Project attacks rural water, environmental and housing problems from Delaware to Florida. It helped create other regional agencies like it around the country, as well as a national organization, the Rural Community Assistance Program.

In Virginia alone, the Virginia Water Project has generated $225 million in private and public money and helped 78,500 homes get safe drinking water and sewage disposal. It also helps rural communities build waste-water treatment systems.

Terry, a native of Roanoke, is a 1964 graduate of Lucy Addison High School and attended Virginia Western Community College. She now attends Roanoke College.

For years, she was a PTA leader at Westside Elementary School. She and her husband, Ronald Terry, have four children and six grandchildren.

As leader of Concerned Citizens of Roanoke and a lay leader at Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church, Mary Terry has fought crime and has organized recreational events for children in Northwest Roanoke, where she lives. She recently was appointed to Roanoke's curfew committee, which is reviewing a law against gatherings of people younger than 18 after 10 p.m.

Terry's career has grown steadily since her first jobs in the 1960s at a Roanoke tomato packing house and an apparel plant, where she made collars for dresses and shirts.

Striking out from manual labor, she sought training at a federally funded training center and landed a trainee's position at Total Action Against Poverty, Roanoke's anti-poverty agency. As a financial clerk there, she joined a team of TAP workers designing a precursor to the Virginia Water Project. The project is no longer part of TAP but retains strong ties to it.

Terry moved from TAP to the water project in 1973 and worked her way up from bookkeeper/secretary to office manager to assistant to the director and to her current job, director of administration.

"She's been like a sponge to learn," Warren said Thursday. "She wants to learn everything. I told her, `Mary, you probably can't learn everything in theworld before you die.' But she wants to."

Terry represents the organization in dealings with key financial backers, such as the Ford Foundation and the Aspen Institute, and travels around the United States to promote the agency's work.

One of her first missions, she said, will be to regain money the state cut from the water project in recent years. While state government and foundations still support the organization, state funding has declined by 25 percent. She said its current staff of 17 is far too small to tackle the poverty that is escalating in rural areas.

by CNB