Shellye Arnold

President Emeritus

Biography

After serving as President and CEO of Memorial Park Conservancy for more than eleven years, Shellye Arnold assumed the position of President Emeritus in November 2024. Memorial Park Conservancy is a nonprofit organization charged with operating and maintaining 1,100 acres of Houston’s Memorial Park. At 1,500 acres, Memorial Park is the city’s largest urban park with an important place in the nation’s history and welcomes over 4 million visitors annually from 170 zip codes across the region. She joined the Conservancy in March 2013 and, with her staff, Board, project partners, design team, and donors has led the transformation of Memorial Park that is currently underway. Memorial Park’s Ten-Year Plan will deliver more than $200M of improvements by 2028. This includes the 100-acre Clay Family Eastern Glades and Sports Complex that both opened in 2020, a new 1-mile segment of the Seymour Lieberman Trail that opened in 2022, the 100-acre Kinder Land Bridge and Cyvia and Melvyn Wolff Prairie that opened February 2023 and the Running Complex which opened November 2023.

Shellye and her team led the creation and adoption of the 2015 Memorial Park Master Plan, engaging thousands of Houstonians as well as ecologists, scientists and other consultants to inform this visionary plan. Starting with a team of three and a $300K annual budget, Shellye has worked with her leadership team to build the Conservancy. Today, the Conservancy has 70+ employees and has raised over $125M in private funds and $100M in public funds to deliver the planned improvements to Memorial Park, program Memorial Park for Park visitors, and care for the Park. She has implemented progressive employment practices yielding retention rates that are double national averages; built a high-functioning, diverse and inclusive Board of Directors; and delivered a Master Plan that has won multiple local and national awards. In 2022, a New York Times article named the Land Bridge and Prairie project as one of the world’s 11 most innovative projects. She and her team work to ensure that Memorial Park welcomes all Houstonians and that the Conservancy reflects Houston in terms of composition and how the organization improves, operates, and programs Memorial Park.

Shellye brings a background in results-oriented leadership and change management from her nearly 20 years at Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq Computer Corporation and McKinsey & Company. Having studied public policy, she spent the first part of her career with the Texas and U.S. Departments of Commerce, where she worked on the North American Free Trade Agreement. For the State Department, she delivered analysis that impacted U.S. trade policy. Shellye speaks Spanish fluently and previously worked as a volunteer public health worker and leader in multiple Latin American countries. A graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, Shellye also holds a master’s in public policy from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. The Houston Chronicle identified Shellye as “one of Houston’s most interesting people.” She was named one of Houston’s “Fifty Most Influential Women of 2022” and one of the Houston Business Journal’s “Women Who Mean Business” of 2023.

A native Houstonian, Shellye cares deeply for the city’s public and green spaces that forge life-affirming connections to others, to nature, and to health. She is grateful to the staff, Board, donors, project partners, visionaries, volunteers, civic leaders, planners, builders, park visitors and others who are making the transformation of Memorial Park possible. Shellye and her wife, Tina Sabuco, volunteer in animal rescue, delight in their many adopted dogs and cats and recently celebrated their 35th anniversary.