Starting Over

In 1971, Hively’s life dramatically changed direction.

Her husband left her for a fellow psychologist, she says, giving her no choice but to draw on her experiences and connections as a volunteer to begin to make a living on her own.

Almost every position she has since held—and the list goes on and on—has some foundation in the volunteer work she conducted earlier in her life.

“I always talk about how volunteer work is the best training,” she says. “It gets your foot in the door.”

In Hively’s case, the door in which she stuck her foot was the Minneapolis political machine.

From her volunteer position on Minnesota’s Riverfront Advisory Committee, she was hired to develop a plan for the state’s riverfront development. And because of her active role as a volunteer for the Parent Teacher Association, she worked for three years evaluating local school programs as part of the Minneapolis Accountability Project.

In these jobs, she gained the political and administrative experience that helped her land a job as a planning consultant to the superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools. In that role, Hively developed a five-year plan to desegregate local public schools by allowing students to choose which schools they attended.

As she was building up her resume, Hively married her second husband John G. Darley, then psychology department chair at UMN, in 1976. She says she decided to keep her first husband’s last name so that she could share it with her children.

For six years in the 1980s, Hively served as Minneapolis’ deputy mayor, a position in which she managed the office for Mayor Donald M. Fraser.

And at the end of the decade, Hively decided to use her experience and connections to start her own non-profit organization called Minneapolis YOUTH TRUST, a “schools-business-labor-community collaborative to prepare youth for productive careers.”Moving On

In the early ’90s, Hively says her family life took a turn for the worse. Within a span of a few months after her son’s marriage, both her mother and second husband passed away.

When a head hunter called her in 1991 to offer her a job as president of the Golden Apple Foundation for Excellence in Teaching, Hively knew it was time for a change.

She moved to Chicago to lead the organization, which recognizes and helps recruit outstanding teachers. During her three-year tenure, the foundation became a statewide initiative and added a program which also recognized outstanding high school seniors.

As Hively entered her early 60s, she decided that it was time for the teachers themselves to run the Golden Apple Foundation and returned to Minnesota.