When one walks into Loren DeRoy’s beautifully decorated home and meanders through her meticulously maintained grounds in Rolling Hills, one can easily see what she holds dear – art, nature and horses. Art collected from travels around the world, as well as those created by her sons, adorns nearly every surface. More often than not, the art depicts open land and horses. During her 20-year volunteer career on the Peninsula, DeRoy has applied her enthusiasm, education and business background to initiate major programs and lead the Palos Verdes Art Center as well as other community groups.
As president of the Palos Verdes Art Center, which celebrates its eightieth anniversary this year, DeRoy is guiding the newly renamed organization – the Palos Verdes Art Center and Community School of Art – as it relocates to temporary facilities while its present building undergoes major renovation.
She speaks excitedly as she shares renditions of the new facility, which will have a brand new façade and layout. “It will have a sleek and modern look to inspire the next generation of artists and the community at large,” DeRoy explains.
During her term as PVAC president, DeRoy hopes to try new ideas. Working to develop programs so that local residents of different cultures will feel more a part of the Art Center is one of her ideas. “In this anniversary year,” she says, “the PVAC will celebrate our diversity and all the people that we serve.”
Loren DeRoy, whose undergraduate degree is in special education, plans to emphasize the educational aspects of the PVAC. She notes that over 2000 students take classes every year at the center. These participants range in age from three to eighty.
“Loren is the best kind of leader a nonprofit like the art center can have,” said Bob Yassin, the center’s chief executive officer says. “She has had a long experience with us. She is well known and active in the community, and most important, she is hard working and committed to doing the best job possible.”
“I think art should be part of all society,” DeRoy explains. “I think sometimes we take it for granted and we need to place an emphasis on how important it is. The arts teach us how to see things differently from our own perspective and without necessarily relying on what has come before. In this way, art teaches us to create, to innovate and to solve problems. These skills are just as basic as math, but they are crucial to our ability to adapt, to change and to solve even our global challenges.”
When acquiring art for their personal collection, DeRoy says that her husband Craig, a retired president of a Fortune 500 company, has a good eye for picking art. However, she insists that she is just an art appreciator. In any case, whether traveling to far corners of the globe or viewing art at the Palos Verdes Art Center, the DeRoys have built a diverse and eclectic art collection. Their collection includes arts and crafts from African village co-ops, as well as California impressionist paintings, some by former PVAC President Don Crocker.
As the daughter of a United States Air Force officer, she moved multiple times, but she quickly made friends with horse lovers in each new community. After college, she taught special education and then went on to earn an MBA from San Diego State University. She and Craig DeRoy, an attorney turned corporate executive, have been married 27 years. They have two sons, Doug and Bryant, both in their twenties.
When Craig started to travel on business, DeRoy turned her talents to volunteering in the community. She served as parks commissioner for the City of Rolling Hills Estates and planning commissioner for the City of Rolling Hills, among other “positions. Some of her most important contributions have been her volunteer work for the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy. There, she served as project manager, consultant and board member, raising over $2 million in local, state and federal funding which transformed the former Nike Missile site into the White Point Nature Preserve. For her efforts, she earned both a State of California Achievement Award for Parkland Planning and Design and the Conservation Partner Award from the PVPLC.
When her older son David was in kindergarten, DeRoy’s first association with the Palos Verdes Art Center was as a docent for Art at Your Fingertips. She later became president of AAYF. She has since served in a variety of positions as a trustee of the Art Center, writing grant proposals for their outreach programs and developing a participatory healing arts program for surgical care waiting rooms. In 1999, she co-authored and helped to publish the PVAC’s award winning art curriculum guidebook entitled The Art at Your Fingertips Guidebook.
“Art at Your Fingertips is a great example of what community partnerships can achieve,” she says. “For 35 years, the PVAC in partnership with the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District and the PTA has provided quality art education programming to our elementary school children . . . a truly amazing accomplishment. Many people talk about community partnerships, but few are as successful in meeting their goals and addressing the needs of the community as AAYF has been.”
Keeping with her interest in art, she also co-founded the Arts Booster Club at Palos Verdes Peninsula High School.
Currently, she serves as vice president of Medeem US, a social-impact nonprofit in Africa she co-founded with her husband Craig after he retired in 2007. Medeem endeavors to empower the world’s poor by establishing cost-effective and sustainable in-country means of documenting land rights to increase land ownership.
Every morning she goes to the barn to muck stalls and groom her two horses. It is her time to think. She is back to nature, back to the land and at peace. It’s where she comes up with her best ideas. Undoubtedly, many of these ideas will be about steering the PVAC into its next phase of growth.
After all, DeRoy says, “the PVAC is a perfect place to bring people together.”
