The startup Overton Park Conservancy was on such a shoestring back in 2012 when it was launching, it could not offer employee benefits — even to the executive director.

Tina Sullivan took the position, so thrilled to have her dream job by age 40 that she was willing to go without paid time off and group insurance. She’d seen what the public-private conservancy had achieved at Shelby Farms Park first-hand because, starting several years earlier, she had been its one-person development department.

In her bones, she also knew the power of public, green spaces.

In 12 years, Sullivan, her board of directors and hundreds of volunteers and donors have added value to Overton Park. The greenspace in the heart of the city was once famously set to be bulldozed for a freeway.

As late as 2011, decades after the 1971 Supreme Court case that saved it, the City of Memphis was spending $150,000 a year to mow and pick up trash on the 180-plus acres, more than half of them an old-growth forest riddled with invasive plants. 

Sullivan, a 1989 graduate of Frayser High School, recently announced her plans to step down.