DOORWAYS President and CEO Opal Jones, a two-time UMSL graduate, cuts the ribbon during a ceremony to open the Jefferson Avenue Campus in October 2022. (Photos courtesy of DOORWAYS)
Life can change in the blink of an eye, and it certainly did for University of Missouri–St. Louis alum Opal Jones. In the span of only seven years, Jones went from being a stay-at-home mom to standing at the helm of a cherished St. Louis nonprofit as its president and CEO.
Under Jones’s guidance over the years that followed, DOORWAYS would eventually lead a successful $40 million fundraising campaign, establish a client service center on a brand-new three-acre campus and grow to assist 3,000 people living with HIV each year. Jones herself would garner recognition for her visionary leadership from the St. Louis Business Journal, the Urban League of St. Louis, the CREW and many other organizations.
But on that first day as CEO, Jones said, she knew she had a lot to learn.
Opal Jones has served as the president and CEO of the nonprofit DOORWAYS since 2012. She earned both a BSBA and MBA from UMSL.
“I skipped some grades,” she said, referencing the short four-and-a-half years at DOORWAYS during which she progressed from office manager to organizational leader. “When I was first hired, the president told me, ‘I can tell how much you care. I could probably teach you to run this place in five years.’ And she did. I had to learn some things the hard way and make some errors, but it all worked out.”
Jones credits UMSL with helping her along that path.
Her UMSL journey began when she transferred as a sophomore, and she planned to immediately enter the business world upon graduating. But, as is so often the case, life had other plans.
“As my undergraduate degree was ending, I had my first son and then another right after that, so I became a stay-at-home mom,” Jones said. “It made the most sense, and it was what I wanted to do.”
Her commitment to being a full-time parent temporarily restricted her professional endeavors to part-time work. But when her children were old enough to begin preschool, Jones began looking for full-time employment outside the home. Her first job was as an office manager with the YWCA.
“I had real estate experience and several side hustles, but I didn’t have much full-time office experience,” she said. “The branch director said, ‘You’re not really qualified to do this job – why do you think you can be the office manager here?’ And I said, ‘I have a business degree from UMSL.’ I thought that automatically qualified me!”
The YWCA director evidently agreed, and with that, Jones’s career in nonprofit management was launched.
An eventual branch closure during the 2008 recession led Jones to make a lateral move to DOORWAYS, where her work ethic, education and natural aptitude for business helped her quickly work her way up the ladder. When she earned the organization’s highest leadership position and was offered the opportunity to simultaneously pursue an MBA, Jones again chose UMSL.
“My undergraduate program is where I learned the language and the basics of business,” Jones said. “But in the graduate program, we learned to take large amounts of information and distill it down into a format that allowed us to sell a case, to tell a story, to provide a compelling presentation.”
Jones found her coursework to be immediately applicable to her new role. DOORWAYS, which focuses on improving the social determinants of health by providing housing to people living with HIV, was outgrowing its old footprint and was poised at the edge of transformational change.
“It was during that time frame that I had a dream to build a building here, which ultimately became the Jefferson Avenue Campus,” she said. “I utilized the project management courses to put together a rudimentary project profile that ultimately became the $40 million capital campaign and the Jefferson Avenue Campus that we have now. It was a great platform to be able to test an idea in its infancy, then bring it back to the organization, to work with board members and staff to refine and implement it.”
The Jefferson Avenue Campus has helped DOORWAYS become a model for other regional and national HIV/AIDS nonprofit programs.
“We’ve had so many groups from across the region and the country come in to see what we have done – truckloads of people from HUD and other funding agencies who look at us as an example of what is possible,” Jones said. “How cool is it to be able to inspire the next generation of nonprofit leaders and to show them what can be done. It really is just paying it forward.”
When asked about some of the lessons she had learned along the way, Jones is quick to credit others and to recognize the importance of teamwork in organizational success.
“Get as many smart people in the room as you can,” she said. “Never be intimidated by smart people. Let them come in and do the things they do best. A long time ago, someone gave me this advice about leading a team: you do the things that only you can do, and you let other people do the things that they are good at.”
Jones also notes that even though a path may not be quick or linear, clarity of intention and grit will eventually yield results for individuals and organizations alike.
“You have to have a vision, and you have to be singular in that vision once it’s forged until you get where you want to be,” she said. “In spite of changes to my original plan of going straight from college into the workforce, I still got to my goal. I maybe even got there faster than I would have if I had gone the traditional route.
“I didn’t know where life would lead me, but you just have to trust that if you are doing things in the right way and with the right intention, you will be on the right path.”
