TU alumna Wendy E. Thomas has devoted her career to improving Tulsa’s quality of life through her active role in the nonprofit sector. Wendy’s years of dedicated service and strong leadership have helped make Tulsa a great place to live, work, and play.
Wendy grew up in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. She graduated from The University of Tulsa in 1990 with a BA in Literature. She earned her master’s degree in Arts Administration from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin.
The arts have always been important to Wendy, including fine arts, literature, dance, and music. She has pursued this interest through her career, working in development and marketing positions for the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and then for the West Virginia Public Theater, before returning to Tulsa.
In Tulsa, Thomas worked in several progressively responsible roles for the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa (later known as ahha Tulsa), eventually serving a six-year stint as that group’s executive director. She assumed her role as the executive director of Leadership Tulsa in 2002. Leadership Tulsa is a nonprofit whose mission is to identify, develop, and connect diverse leaders who impact the community through service.
During her twenty-plus years at Leadership Tulsa, Wendy has greatly expanded the organization’s programs and its impact on the community. Among other projects, Thomas tirelessly worked on the development of a customized office to better serve the organization’s needs, called the Leadership Tulsa Center. This training and coworking space opened in 2020 in a renovated downtown warehouse in the still emerging Gunboat Park neighborhood.
Wendy has served on numerous local nonprofit boards, and she has been an adjunct professor at TU, teaching nonprofit administration in the arts management program. She is a frequent consultant to area nonprofits for board development and strategic planning, and she lectures often about Generations in the Workplace.
Thomas has received numerous awards, including the Association of Leadership Programs’ Preceptor Award, the highest honor in her field; the Women in Communications’ Newsmaker Award; the Tulsa Business Journal’s Woman of Distinction Award, the Typros Boomtown Award, and the Junior League of Tulsa’s Community Gem recognition. In 2022, Wendy was awarded the Herald Givens Heart of Leadership Tulsa Award by the Leadership Tulsa Board for her twenty years of service.
Wendy has fond memories of her time spent at TU. In 2014, she generously created a planned gift, called The University of Tulsa Honors Program – Wendy E. Thomas Trust, to benefit TU after her passing. She and her husband, Ralph Bendel, Jr., have also contributed to other areas at TU, including the D’Arcy Fellows Program in the Henry Kendall College of Arts and Sciences. This fund provides paid internships for arts and sciences majors.
With friends like Wendy Thomas, both TU and the city of Tulsa are sure to prosper, benefiting from her leadership skills, her dedicated support of the arts, and her generous commitment to helping those around her achieve their goals.
