Lucie Wray Todd

Columbus | Community Volunteer, Philanthropist, Rancher

Ms. Todd was a community volunteer, philanthropist and rancher who had had a long interest in environmental protection. In the 1960s, she was involved with a Houston non-profit, Citizens Who Care, which spawned a number of regional environmental efforts, including the Citizens Environmental Coalition. During the 1980s, Ms Todd was part of a successful 35-year effort to defeat a dam on the Colorado River, known as Columbus Bend or Shaws Bend, that had been proposed by the Lower Colorado River Authority and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. In the 1990s she worked with the Houston and National Audubon Societies to bring environmental education to tens of thousands of Houston school children, through a program known as Audubon Adventures. To help broaden financial support for similar environmental efforts, she helped organize two foundations, the Wray Charitable Trust and the Magnolia Charitable Trust, both of which focused their grantmaking on environmental work in Texas, protecting habitat and wildlife, as well as guarding public health. To create more of a linkage among other grantmakers with similar interests, she was an early supporter of the Texas Environmental Grantmakers Group. She was also interested in promoting the possibilities of improved land management in the land and cattle business that she directed, by investing in organic and grassfed beef production, crossfencing, supplemental water, intensive grazing, native prairie planting, cowbird control, hunting cooperative participation, and vegetation and wildlife monitoring.