Myra Williams

Vice President/Marketing, Howard Group

If it were possible to create a canopy road out of sabal palms, Myra Williams would be a great candidate to get the job done.

She grew up in rural Louisiana in the shadow of majestic live oaks and brought a fondness for trees to Florida. Her greenhouse is home to more than 200 species of plants. She begins most every day by walking about her neighborhood and renewing her appreciation for the beautiful environment where she lives.

Williams concedes that the Gulf of Mexico is the predominant natural feature of Northwest Florida, but away from the beach, she is committed to preserving the area’s magnificent heritage trees and to providing for mitigation plans whenever trees are removed.

She is a member of the City of Destin’s Environment, Parks, Recreation and Trees Committee and, in that capacity, is working to develop Tree Preservation and Protection regulations that she hopes will be made part of city codes one day. That’s not the kind of effort that takes root quickly, but Williams is patient.

How does she reconcile her love of trees with her employment for more than 20 years as a marketer for a developer? Keith Howard, she says, makes that easy.

Williams says Mr. Howard, president and CEO of the Howard Group, has a conscientious vision for building and managing sustainable projects. “Part of the beauty of my job,” she says, “is getting to embrace and enhance those shopping centers and town centers from a public relations perspective.”

The other big part is interfacing with nonprofit organizations working to make Destin and Okaloosa County a better and healthier place. She is intimately involved in developing the Howard Group’s annual contributions budgets and, in so doing, interacts with more than 40 charities.

On a recent day, she was fresh from a meeting with Habitat for Humanity. She is on the marketing committee for the Emerald Coast Children’s Advocacy Center, and not surprisingly, she is on the board at Trees for the Coast, a nonprofit committed to planting trees in Walton and Okaloosa counties.

She admires the commitments and contributions of women including public relations professional Kaye Phelan; Julie Hurst, the executive director at the Children’s Advocacy Center; and Marcia Hull, the executive director at the Mattie Kelly Arts Foundation.

She lists as mentors God, her mother and her boss in that order. 

But the best advice she ever received, she says, came from her husband, Michael, who always has advised her to “be yourself, affect positive change and give back becase we have been given such a blessed life.”