Deborah Jordy. Photo by RJ Sangosti

On the cusp of retiring, Deborah Jordy sits on her patio at her Cherry Creek home speaking with devotion and no small about of poetry about a favorite topic. The executive director of the SCFD, one of the nation’s most innovative and consequential local sources of arts and culture funding —the seven-county Scientific and Cultural Facilities District— is singing the praises not of the arts but of the land.

“I can still close my eyes and go up that road and I know exactly where there’s the bramble and the square scrub oak, where wild turkeys hung out and then further up where in the fall the elk were bugling…”

This ode occurred as Jordy recalled the vistas she encountered with regularity during the four years she spent as the leader of the Cherokee Ranch & Castle Foundation in the town of Sedalia.  Reimagined by Mildred Montague Genevieve “Tweet” Kimball, the vast ranch and its unexpected Scottish-castle, home to a collection of 19^th and early 20th century English fine arts and decorative arts. “That’s how they sort of enticed me,” Jordy says, while sharing a breakfast of bagels, butter and berries.

Deborah Jordy with representatives of the SCFD Tier I organizations

Of her roles over a five-decade run — as a curatorial assistant and then assistant curator at the Denver Art Museum, as the executive director of the Arvada Center, as the leader of the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts — that stint in Douglas County might look like an outlier.

In retrospect, it was a perfect post for the Colorado-born leader. Over the past nine years, Jordy has deftly stewarded the taxpayer-funded special tax district tasked with apportioning monies to Denver and Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Douglas and Jefferson counties. She’s often guided the leaders of their more than 300 arts and culture organizations, which span from the mammoth to the wee, from the Denver Center for the Performing Arts to the Rocky Mountain Birds Center.

“It was a very unique experience, having always been a kind of arts chick and city chick. The ranch —and the cattle ranch —gave me a different sense of humility.” A humility that, Jordy believes led her to “pause and think about everything in my life— my jobs, the world around me. And that’s helped me also think about how I think about my relationships.”

It’s that self-awareness as well as her gift for making connections, that arts leaders lauded when talking about Jordy’s role in shaping the state’s arts and culture sector and her gift for fostering friendships that extend far beyond their professional beginnings.

“Coming into the DCPA as a non-arts leader was daunting,” Denver Center CEO Janice Sinden recalls. “But Deb took me under her wing pretty much from Day One and made introductions. She helped me navigate questions in community. And she was a confidant. She was concerned about my welfare.”

Time and again, a sense of being seen, nurtured, heard is what the area’s arts and culture leaders note about Jordy.

“I can’t remember how I first met her, but she always seemed really, really intrigued about what we were doing,” says Mike Henry, co-founder of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, a literary arts organization. “Periodically she would say, ‘Hey, do you want to come and read some poetry? Or she’d come see Lighthouse or call to meet for coffee. She just realizes what people need.”

If you’ve attended a Denver Center show or sent your young’un to a theater camp, chances are you’ve heard a shout out to the SCFD. Ditto the Zoo, the Botanic Gardens, the Museum of Nature & Science or the Denver Art Museum. Just as likely, if you’ve taken in a play at Su Teatro, one of the nation’s oldest Chicano theaters, or gone to open mic night at Swallow Hill or a concert at Parker Arts Center, you, too, have heard SCFD thanked.

Since, 2016, Jordy has steered the SCFD (along with its muscular board), helping guide its swath of county commissions and member organizations that are, through a complex fiscal formula, separated into three tiers. As with any seeming caste system, there’s some tension.

“Running an organization that funds 300-plus arts organizations, there is always competition, and there is always that sense of ‘I’m not getting my part or I’m not getting enough or, you know, why, why, why!?’” say the Tier I Denver Center’s Sinden. Having worked in mayoral administration before taking the reins at the Denver Center, Sinden is no stranger to competing and demanding constituencies.

“She clearly understands how each tier fits in,” says George Sparks, CEO of another Tier I, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. ““She’s really adept at managing this improbable group of people, all these institutions and geographies and boards and egos and talents. She can manage all that with a light touch. It’s really kept this coalition together over her tenure.” It’s a skill that no doubt sealed her position at SCFD but preceded it, too.

“Deborah has an incredible ability to bring together people who have no interest in coming together,” said Tony Garcia, founder and artistic director of Su Teatro Cultural and Performing Arts Center, a Tier III organization that has been around for more than 50 years. “She listens and nudges, offering bridges and connections. She has always kept the lines of communication open, being very cognizant of the eventual goal.” The two worked on several committees together when they were on the Denver Commission on Cultural Affairs. “We were a bit of an odd couple you might think, but Deborah has a way of bringing out the pragmatism in you. Whether she’s pushing, cajoling or disagreeing, she may lose the battle, but continues the relationship.”

The Five-Decade Listening Tour

Staff of the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD)

When Jordy was 21, she left Colorado for Los Angeles, where she and three friends set up an art studio. “I had this not wild but pretty fun time,” says Jordy, who studied ceramics and sculpture at Colorado State University. “Okay, a little wild,” she adds. “It was in an old rattan factory, and we had a big old studio in Pasadena before Pasadena was hip and cool. There’s a band that was in the other studio. There were people coming and going.” Jordy was doing ceramic sculpture. Others were painting. Still others were engaged in newer creative practices. “We’re at that age: We’re up all night talking about our work, having these deep and meaningful conversations about whatever, whoever we’re reading and everything. And how we’re going to set the world on fire.”

Maybe it was the stark difference between those gabfests and the quiet of studio, but Jordy found working alone in the studio too solitary. So, “I started curating a few small shows. Just little tiny things but thinking more about curatorial work and writing.” When she moved back to Denver, she needed a job. That’s when she snagged an opportunity as an assistant in exhibition design at the Denver Art Museum.

“I was still making art. I was showing. I was selling a little bit. But I realized one thing about myself: I was an okay artist, but I was never going be this extraordinary force in the art world. And I wasn’t interested in that sort of solitary life. I really needed to interact and engage with people. And that’s the start of the listening piece.”

Even when she’s the subject of an interview, Jordy proves to be an avid and subtle listener. ““I always strive to be a better listener,” she says of one of her most warm and vital skills. “I think the more I can hear, the better off I am in the world.”

While at DAM, she became an assistant curator to Diane Vanderlip, founding curator of the museum’s Modern and Contemporary Art Department. (“One day she said, I need a curatorial assistant. I said, ‘Okay, I could do that.’”) After years at the museum as an associate curator, she didn’t take the predictable next step — pursuit of either a PhD or another curatorial job in a different city — she took a run not at a visual arts job but at a top arts administration position someone suggested she look into: executive director of the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities.

It was a cabinet-level role in city government, where her peers in the room would be the city manager, the head of public works, the city attorney. Jordy had never worked in government.

“It was really interesting getting to know other people in public service, committed to their communities,” she says. “Oddly enough, I became really good friends, with the chief of police,” she says, smiling. “I had never known a cop in my life But, this is the fun part. I wish we’d done this. You remember Click and Clack? Well, I wanted to do a radio show called the ‘Art Chick and the Cop’.”

After Arvada, she stormed the Ranch & Castle. From that culture-meets-pasturage adventure, she went on to be the executive director of the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts.

Hers is a career path that looks both accidental and prescient: each stop building a knowledge base, a social network, a sense of what was possible when arts and culture and science collaborate that made her time at SCFD seem pre-ordained. Have a deep appreciation for what makes Colorado special: check. Have a love of the arts and artists: check. Have a respect and grasp of arts patrons and business sector allies: check. Have a cool head for roiling times and prickly rooms: check.

Deborah Jordy and the SCFD Bear during Day at the Capitol

“Do not pass up opportunity. You never know what’s around that corner,” she tells her 15-year-old grandson. (Jordy raised her son, Alex, while being a “solo mother,” adding yet another dimension to what she’s achieved.) “I’ve always felt that was important for the roadmap of my career, because it wasn’t a straight path.”

Even so, Elaine Torres, director of community & strategic partnerships at CBS News Colorado has witnessed the throughline. Torres was on the SCFD board when Jordy was hired but knew her when she was leading CBCA. “She has been such an arts advocate and supporter the entire time I’ve known her. And even looking back at her history and where she’s worked and what she’s done, I mean, that’s kind of the common thread through every single thing,” she says.

Culture futurist Theo Edmonds locates his dear friend and colleague’s most transformative gifts in her enduring curatorial spirit. It has served Colorado’s— and the nation’s — arts sector, he believes. The two met years ago in a cocktail lounge during an Americans in the Arts conference, of which he remains a trustee; she had been one.

“Deborah’s professional importance comes from her personal journey,” he says. “She’s obviously got all the skills that come along with being a top-notch executive. But it’s also her background as a curator and her background growing up as a Coloradan and seeing the state transition from kind of an energy-oil sector state to now a very cosmopolitan quantum place.

“It may be a term used too much, but I mean it in its most authentic sense: Deborah is a servant leader,” he says. “How does she leverage her personal insights and skills toward the good of the artist, the good of the organization or whoever she’s serving,” says Edmonds. “She builds for the long haul but recognizes she’s a steward of a specific moment.”

As Jordy revisited a career nearing —not an end, no — but an exhilarating transition, her newest family member, Tom, laid breathing deeply in the morning sun near her feet. The orange terrier rescue with Benji scruff has been with Jordy all of 24 hours and already seems to know, as so many of the area’s arts and culture leaders, that Jordy is deserving of his trust. And ours.