As a trustee and the director of programs at the Ross Foundation in Arkadelphia, Mary Elizabeth Eldridge oversees grant distributions to support public education in Clark County, including a focus on pre-K education in the Arkadelphia School District and the Arkadelphia Promise. She serves on the Fayetteville Public Education Foundation, where she has served as the grants committee chair, the Nature Conservancy of Arkansas and the Arkansas Forestry Association. She is a past commissioner of the Arkansas Forestry Commission and a former board member of the Arkansas Community Foundation and Baptist Health Foundation.
Before joining the Ross Foundation, Eldridge worked as an associate at Wright, Lindsey & Jennings in the transactional and corporate law division. She earned her law degree from the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville, where she served on the Arkansas Law Review editorial board. She earned a bachelor’s degree in European history with a concentration in environmental studies from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.