H.E. Butt Foundation: 6,000 hours of recorded history, a 1,900-acre Frio River ranch, and a 3 a.m. phone call on July 16

Marcus Goodyear woke up at 3 a.m. on July 16.

The H.E. Butt Foundation’s camps on the Frio River — 1,900 acres along the headwaters, roughly 15 miles north of Leakey — sit in a canyon that floods fast. Goodyear got on the phone with the canyon spotters and started working. By the time families across Texas woke to news reports about flooding in the Hill Country, the foundation had a crisis communications plan running: twice-daily emails to every camp family, health teams redistributed so every single camp had an on-site nurse, food and water verified, cabin protocols executed.

The River Road — the famous feature of the property where visitors must physically drive through the shallow Frio River to reach different campsites — was closed. The Frio rose and then receded. The camps held.

Goodyear appeared Friday on The Lead Live’s Nonprofit Week to represent a foundation that most Kerrville residents know by name but few fully understand. The H.E. Butt Foundation and the H-E-B grocery company are, as Goodyear put it, “good cousins” — related by the same family history but legally and financially separate entities.

“Everybody knows Ford Motor Company,” he said. “And then there’s this thing called the Ford Foundation. If you buy a Ford, you’re not contributing to the Ford Foundation. They’re just different entities operated by this same history.”

The foundation was established in 1933 and chartered in January 1934 by Howard Butt Sr. and his wife Mary Holdsworth Butt, who served as its first president. It moved to Kerrville around 1954. Howard Butt Jr. led the organization through the 1970s and 1980s. The current board represents a third generation of family leadership under David Rogers and his wife Deborah. The Butt family’s philanthropic footprint also includes the Charles Butt Foundation and Raise Your Hand Texas — each a separate entity, each with a distinct focus.

Goodyear worked directly under Howard Butt Jr. for 10 years, attending six-hour meetings at his home. During Friday’s segment, the foundation played a vintage radio recording of Howard Jr. on the nature of leadership.

“The best bosses are inclusive,” the recording said. “The best bosses grow their own success by cultivating others.”

Howard Jr.’s signature concept was “the high calling of our daily work” — the theological argument that faith is expressed not primarily in a pew but in how you treat the people around you every day.

“Being Christian means I serve my neighbors in all that I do,” Goodyear said.

The foundation’s stated mission is “to cultivate wholeness in people and institutions for the transformation of communities.” Goodyear unpacked “wholeness” as the Hebrew concept of shalom — peace, completion, the opposite of the individualism and distraction he described as defining modern life.

That framework drives three major program areas. The first is Safe and Supported Texas Schools, which evolved from a pilot that trained teachers on their own mental wellness before asking them to support struggling students. The research-backed return on investment is striking: every dollar invested in student mental health care before a problem emerges saves $7 in downstream taxpayer costs — primarily through reduced incarceration.

The second is the Congregational Collective, now spun off as an independent 501(c)(3) with Templeton Foundation backing. The program was born from a finding that 80% of pastors receive daily requests from congregants for mental health assistance — yet most churches have no formal structure for responding. The Collective trains churches to use their existing programs and relationships to serve members in crisis.

The third is disaster response. The Butt family, the foundation, and H-E-B jointly contributed $5 million to 2025 flood recovery through the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country. After the floods, the foundation convened a Mental Health and Resiliency Coalition of 35 direct providers, counselors, and school clinicians who met at Schreiner University and coordinated services — with many eventually folding into the county’s official long-term recovery structure. The foundation also hired hydrologists and engineers to build a publicly accessible early-warning flood system on its portion of the Frio River, in response to new state requirements under HB1 and SB1.

The foundation’s archives may be its most underappreciated asset: 6,000 hours of recordings dating to the 1940s — speeches, conversations, and presentations from the many figures who have passed through Laity Lodge and foundation events over eight decades. That archive includes addresses by Presidents Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter; clips from those presidential recordings were recently compiled and featured in the final episode of the second season of The Echoes Podcast. Goodyear serves as editor-in-chief of Echoes, the foundation’s free quarterly magazine, and hosts The Echoes Podcast, which has featured conversations with guests including David Brooks, Austin Kleon, Sho Baraka, and John Guerra.