Your incredible neighbors: Community activist ‘loves to learn’

Joan Browning has given back to the community of Green Valley for more than 30 years.

Her many contributions include her work with the Green Valley Community Coordinating Council, Green Valley Recreation, the Greater Green Valley Community Foundation, Country Fair White Elephant and the Continental School Board. She recently retired from the Green Valley Fire District governing board, which she served on for seven and a half years.

But Browning is humble about her accomplishments, and immediately shied away from the title of “Incredible Neighbor.”

“There are many people in this community more ‘incredible’ than me,” she said.

“I only hope that this might encourage people to volunteer. I think a lot of people are worried that they can’t do it, that they don’t have enough time, or experience.”

Browning said she had the same misgivings, but credits her late husband, Bob Browning, with encouraging her to volunteer.

“Every time I said, ‘I could never do that,’ he would always tell me, ‘Of course you can.’”

His encouragement also inspired Browning to attend college when she was in her 40s, after 20 years as a homemaker raising their four children. It was there she discovered her passion for education and later psychology, eventually becoming a professor of speech pathology.

The couple retired to Green Valley from Black Butte Ranch, Ore., in 1977, where Joan soon found herself back at work, training teacher’s aides for several Tucson-area school districts before retiring for good and beginning her volunteer work.

‘A great love story’

During their retirement, she and Bob pursued their lifelong love of traveling and were proud to have visited more than 100 countries — many of them during his career as a colonel in the U.S. Air Force.

Joan calls her 57-year-marriage a “great love story,” which began when Mr. Browning, at the time her high school teacher, left their Indiana town to join the service during World War II. His students decided to keep in touch with their favorite teacher, and appointed Joan the designated letter-writer for the class.

She and Bob fell in love through their letters, and were married in 1942 when Joan was 18. He stayed in the Air Force and they relocated with his posts before settling in Oregon.

“I’d always wanted to be married to one man for the rest of my life and to have four children — two boys and two girls,” she said. “ It worked out perfectly.”

“I’ve led a very privileged life, in many respects.”

GV Fire Board

She says that feeling of privilege extends to her years of community involvement, and especially to her time on the Green Valley Fire District’s governing board, where she served as the clerk of the board and as the chairperson for the district’s Pension Board. The position was challenging, but rewarding, and she learned that the job of a board member is to “make policy, and anything else is interference.”

Board President Ed Clarke, a longtime friend who has also worked with Joan on the Community Foundation and on the GVCCC Budget Committee, says Joan is a perfectionist — in the positive sense of that term — who took an interest in every facet of the Fire District and “exemplifies a person doing everything right.”

“I highly valued her sound and wise advice and counsel over the years, and have the utmost respect for her integrity and commitment,” Clarke said.

Though her husband also served on the Fire Board (from 1982 to 1989), Joan says she knew little about running a Fire District when she first joined and encourages people in the community to take an interest in causes or organizations they may not know much about, both for their personal learning experience, and for the benefit an outsider’s perspective can bring to an organization.

She says Green Valley’s many non-profit and charitable organizations are part of what makes the community so unique, also citing the many acts of kindness, person-to-person, that she’s witnessed and wishes could get more recognition.

“I’ve never lived in a place with more selfless people,” she said.

Joan will be moving to Missoula, Mont., early next year to be closer to her daughter and son-in-law, and is excited about this next chapter in her life.

She’s already planning how she can give back to her new community, and says she would like to work with children in hospitals and elementary schools. She also hopes to take a few classes at the nearby University of Montana, and would love to take a course on Comparative Religion, for example.

“I should be old enough to stop learning,” she joked. “But I can’t help it — I love to learn.”

jrichardson@gvnews.com | 547-9726