Mary Boyle

Mary R. Boyle, a community leader and philanthropist, credits her parents with teaching her the importance of giving back to one’s community. A Portland-area native, she grew up in a home where it was the norm to deliver food baskets at the holidays and where her mom used her skills to create costumes for high school and collegiate theater productions. They also taught her the foundational value of the arts and of education. She calls her Catholic education “the greatest gift my parents gave me. It broadened my hope and my faith and my friendships.” Much of her work has involved paying this gift forward. She serves on the board of De La Salle North Catholic High School, a college preparatory high school for underserved students in the Portland area and the most diverse private high school in all of Oregon. She recently chaired a successful 30-month, $26 million capital campaign to create the De La Salle North Catholic campus, with room for more than 350 students. The work is a labor of love and the love is for students and an abiding hope in their achievements and success. Education, she believes, is “the one thing you can give and it can never be taken away.” At University of Portland, where she currently serves on the Board of Regents, she also loves working with students.

They are, she says rightly, the school’s “heartbeat.” She also particularly loves what the Moreau Center for Service and Justice brings to the school. In the past, Boyle has also served on the boards at St. Mary’s Academy and Jesuit High School, among other institutions. In addition to her service at UP, she is also on the board of the Portland Art Museum and Northwest Film Center. When she went to University of Oregon, she majored in art and print making. She and her husband, Tim Boyle, president and CEO of Columbia Sportswear, have together received the University of Oregon Pioneer Award. Much of their joint philanthropic giving—in terms of educational initiatives and science and medical research—has been an outgrowth of their steadfast love of their family and love of their home, Portland. Boyle noted a few recent experiences that made her feel closer to UP than ever before. Not only did she enlist the expertise of a talented UP graduate-educator for her grandchildren during the pandemic, but she also recently had occasion to meet a UP nurse alumna. The nurse told Boyle that her four children also went to UP and they had also chosen nursing as a career path. The impact of University of Portland on the fabric of Portland was apparent. “I felt so proud,”
Boyle says.