Margot Copeland has a list of accomplishments, honors and awards so long it could fill this entire page, but she doesn’t talk much about any of that.
“A resume only describes what you do,” she says. “A resume does not say who you are.”
So who is Margot Copeland?
“My life has revolved around raising my children and trying to be the best person and contributor I can be,” is how she answers that question.
But, before retiring in 2019, Copeland was also the CEO of the KeyBank Foundation for 18 years — a job that put her in the position to change lives with more than $800 million of grants. Her best work, she says, was funding a Cleveland public school, called KeyBank Classroom for STEM Education at Cleveland State University (MC2 STEM High School). “We really enabled bright and high-performing students in STEM education to spend their 11th and 12th grade years on a college campus,” she says.
Her story really began, however, with her mother’s parents who, although only had a few years of schooling, saw to it that all seven of their kids went to college. “That’s a nugget of who they are,” Copeland says.
Her mother’s first job out of college was a teaching job in a rural community. She was a math teacher who made it her top priority to teach her students, largely the children of sharecroppers, how to tell time and count money so that their families couldn’t be taken advantage of. Her father was a Baptist minister and religious scholar who could answer any question about the Bible she brought to him. They were the kind of people who would open their home to anybody in need.
“Community was the centerpiece and heartbeat of our home,” says Copeland, who moved to Cleveland after college (she earned her bachelor’s degree in physics at Hampton University in Virginia followed by her master’s degree in educational development at The Ohio State University) to take a job as a sales rep for Xerox.
And so that’s the way it was for her, too. While raising her three children and advancing her career, she always found time to give back to her community. Most notably, she was named the Junior League of Cleveland’s first Black president in 1991 and, in 2010, was elected national president of The Links, Inc., an organization of women devoted to strengthening African American communities.
Although she’s retired and her children are grown (her daughter is an ordained minister, her older son is an orthodontist and her younger son works in the nonprofit community) Copeland says she’s “probably more exhausted now than when I was working for Key.”
That’s because she’s on the board of more than a half dozen major institutions, including the AARP, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Foundation Banner Bank, Thomas White Foundation, George W. Codrington Foundation and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
The downtime that’s left is spent with family and friends — and also mentoring young people. Her advice is the same thing her mother told her as she went off to college.
“Go boldly into your future,” she says. “Understand who you are quickly and be your authentic self. ”
