What Perry Williams Built on the Hill, and the Legacy That Continues
Outgoing Board Member with a Strong Vision for Boys Home of Virginia
In the summer of 2020, Perry Williams drove down to Covington, Virginia. The pandemic had pushed everything virtual, including the board of Boys Home of Virginia, where his father had once served and where Perry was thinking about taking a seat. If he was going to be on it, he wanted to know the place first.
He met then-Executive Director Donnie Wheatley and got a full tour of what staff and students still call “the Hill.”
By the time Perry left, he was no longer an arms-length supporter.
“I felt like this was a special place,” he says.
He joined the board, served six years, and chaired it for the last two. This spring, he steps down. The board will welcome Drew McKone as the next chair. Perry, like the chair before him, plans to stay close.
A Long Approach Worth the Drive
Perry’s introduction to Boys Home was, by his own description, was transactional. Virginia offers educational tax credits to nonprofits like Boys Home, allowing state taxpayers to lower their bills while supporting causes they believe in. Perry’s father was on the board. Perry was a Virginia taxpayer. The math was easy.
For years, that was the extent of his involvement. He has had a demanding career in professional services, spending the last 35 years and most of the last decade in management and leadership. He was committed to his Episcopal church, where he served two terms as senior warden, teaching Sunday school and confirmation classes. The hours that weren’t spent volunteering at the church were going to his family.
Then, in the summer of 2020, his vestry term ended. Like many people that year, he found himself asking a quiet, persistent question: where could his time, talent, and treasure have the greatest impact?
It was a phrase he and his wife used together. A way of thinking through their giving.
He thought of Boys Home.
The Math That Multiplies
The drive to Covington didn’t just give Perry his first close look at the campus. It changed his sense of the scale of the work happening there.
He had thought of Boys Home as a school. He came home thinking of it as a force multiplier.
“I have experienced it since then as really thinking not only about the impact we have on these boys, but the impact on their families, their social circles, and ultimately the rest of their lives,” he says.
That arithmetic, in which one young man’s trajectory alters the future of an entire constellation of people around him, is what kept Perry on the board for two terms.
Carrying What Worked, Building What’s Next
Perry’s chairmanship had a clear thesis. Bring Boys Home into the modern era without losing what makes it work.
That meant looking honestly at everything. The digital presence. The marketing. The physical upkeep of the campus. The programs students were actually experiencing day to day. The way the institution told its story to families and donors.
Two programs got particular attention.
The Trades Program teaches young men practical skills they can carry into adulthood. For Perry, it was personal. His father was a master woodworker. When his father passed, the family donated his woodworking equipment to Boys Home.
“To know that equipment and his legacy are helping these [students] learn skills they can take forward with them is extraordinarily fulfilling,” Perry says.
The Farm has become equally central. Many of the young men at Boys Home arrive from cities. Some have never been around livestock. Some have never seen a goat up close, never ridden a horse, never gone fishing.
“It’s about learning responsibility and new skills and getting exposure to things that a lot of these [young men] maybe never had in their past lives,” Perry says.
Up the hill above the main campus, there is a cabin built through the Trades Program where students go camping. Perry made it up there once. He still talks about it.
Two Days, and the Lives They Held
Ask Perry about his favorite memories, and he’ll tell you a few stories before landing on the right one.
There was the Hall of Fame ceremony, reinstituted by the board after a pandemic-era pause. Perry had the privilege of inducting Reverend Chris Roussell, a fellow board member and friend who had unexpectedly passed the previous year. The induction took place on what would have been Perry’s father’s 79th birthday.
He talks about the day with quiet emotion. Two men who had shaped him, two father figures of different kinds, intersected on a single date. He had the chance to honor one of them in the presence of the other’s memory.
There were the campus cookouts before board meetings, where trustees, staff, and students shared a meal that had nothing to do with discipline or curriculum. There were the sunrise hikes and the meals shared with students that always reminded Perry what was actually happening on the Hill.
But the memory he keeps coming back to, the one he calls his favorite, is the Thanksgiving he and his wife brought their adult children and roughly ten cousins to Covington for Thanksgiving dinner with the young men who weren’t going home for the holiday. The traditional meal. The full table. His family meeting the place he had been telling them about for years.
What made it special wasn’t just sharing Boys Home with the people he loved. It was watching his own children develop empathy for young men who hadn’t had the same advantages they grew up with.
Perry is proud of his kids. That day, he was proud of them in a particular way.
Two days. Both stay with him.
The Credit He Will Not Keep
Anyone who has worked with Perry knows how reluctant he is to take credit, even for the things that are clearly his. Pressed on what he is most proud of from his chairmanship, he names the development team’s progress, the renewed focus on programs, the physical work on campus, and the engagement of his fellow trustees. But he keeps circling back to the staff.
“They do God’s work there every single day,” he says.
He talks about how hard it is to build community with forty or fifty young men from very different backgrounds, who didn’t grow up together, whose lives before Boys Home didn’t always teach them how to live alongside one another. He talks about how that work never stops and never really gets easier. And he talks about how the staff shows up for it anyway.
There is a particular kind of board chair who watches that work and feels honored to know the people doing it. Perry is that kind.
The Boys Home He Sees Rising
Perry’s vision for Boys Home is, by his own characterization, simple.
“I think we should be sold out with a wait list,” he says. “And there’s no reason why we can’t be.”
The current capacity is sixty young men. Perry believes the program can serve a hundred. He thinks the demand is there. He thinks the value proposition, a residential education for young men seeking a better path forward at almost no cost to families, is too compelling to remain underappreciated. His business sense tells him the math works. His time on the Hill tells him the impact justifies the investment.
Perry has spent thirty-five years in management and leadership. The last six of them, he has given to a place where the return doesn’t show up on a balance sheet, but in young men’s lives.
Stepping Down, Staying Close
Perry’s term ends this spring. The board welcomes Drew McKone as the next chair. John Williams, who chaired before Perry has been a steady presence and a generous ally. Perry plans to do the same.
“That institutional knowledge is so important to carry forward,” Perry says.
He will stay close in mind, in spirit, and in service. He will be available to Drew the way John has been to him.
If you have been considering whether to support Boys Home, as a donor, a volunteer, or a family exploring residential options for a young man in your life, Perry would tell you the same thing he has told the foundations he has worked with: the impact is visible. You can see exactly where your dollars go and what they do. Not every nonprofit can show you that.
Boys Home can.
Just as the Trades Program has built more than a cabin on the Hill, Perry has helped Boys Home itself rise. He leaves the institution stronger, the mission clearer, and the young men rising further than they could have alone.
That work continues. And so does Perry, in spirit and in counsel.