$10 million latest donation from Hunt family will help build an indoor, multi-sport fieldhouse—raising their philanthropy to date to more than $186 million
osh Hunt knows El Paso’s makeshift gyms better than most.
A father of three, he has spent, by his own count, “many, many evenings and weekends” in rundown warehouses scattered across the city, watching his children and their teammates compete in spaces never meant for sport.
Then come the road trips to tournaments in Phoenix, Albuquerque, Tucson, and Midland, where the facilities make the gap plain.
“Our kids here deserve the same thing you can find in those communities,” he said this week.
Now his family is doing something about it.
The Woody and Gayle Hunt Family Foundation has committed $10 million to the Downtown Deck Plaza Foundation to build an indoor, multi-sport fieldhouse on the planned park that will cap Interstate 10 through the heart of downtown El Paso.
The Woody and Gayle Hunt Family Fieldhouse is envisioned as a 55,000-square-foot venue with an estimated six to eight courts for basketball, volleyball, soccer, and pickleball, built to host regional tournaments as well as performing arts and special events.
Josh Hunt, who serves as president of the foundation his parents created, called it “an investment in our youth and in our future” and promised a facility that would be “first-class, world-class.”
The gift arrived just days after the Fred Loya family pledged $20 million to the same project, now called the Fred Loya Family Deck Plaza.
Together, the two commitments give the 6.5-acre park, stretching over the freeway between Santa Fe and Kansas streets, its two most visible family names: one on the plaza itself, the other on the building most likely to fill it with young people every weekend.
Hunt quickly credited the Loyas and framed the effort as a shared one.
The Deck Plaza, he said, offers “the chance to transform a part of Downtown that has divided our community for generations into a place that connects us,” and it will take “a team effort of public and private sector partners” to finish.
That instinct for partnership runs through nearly four decades of Hunt family giving, and it begins, fittingly, with a love story at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Woody Hunt grew up in the Lower Valley and graduated from Ysleta High School; Gayle graduated from Austin High. They met as freshmen at UTEP, where she first noticed him walking through the library, and they later shared an English class.
He gave her his fraternity pin on their third date.
After two years, they transferred together to the University of Texas at Austin, and Gayle, trained as a teacher, took her first job teaching remedial reading to economically disadvantaged children at an Austin elementary school while Woody finished his master’s degree.
She has said that experience opened her eyes to how much reading and education determine a child’s future, and it shaped the couple’s giving from the start.
Woody returned home around 1970 for what was supposed to be a temporary job in the family business, a retail lumber and building-materials store his father, grandfather, and uncle had opened in the Lower Valley in 1947.
He stayed, rose to lead it, and built what is now Hunt Companies, a diversified holding company with investments in real estate, infrastructure, and operating businesses across North America, Europe, and Australia. Yet even as the company outgrew El Paso, the family’s philanthropy stayed rooted there.
Woody described watching the city’s anchor institutions, its two largest banks, El Paso Natural Gas and, for a time, El Paso Electric, sell, relocate, or falter in the 1980s and 1990s, leaving a civic leadership.
He concluded that owners of smaller businesses “had nowhere to look but ourselves.”
In 1987, he and Gayle formalized their giving through the Woody and Gayle Hunt Family Foundation, funded by Hunt Companies’ shareholders, so they could be, in his words, “a little more disciplined.”
The foundation has since committed more than $186 million, with roughly nine-tenths of every dollar directed to the Borderplex, the binational region spanning El Paso, southern New Mexico, and Ciudad Juárez.
Its six pillars—healthcare, education, economic development, quality of life, arts and local heritage, and elevating the region’s voice in state and national affairs—have remained remarkably steady.
For many years the Hunts gave quietly, often anonymously, before deciding to put their names forward on gifts large enough to rally others.
Healthcare has been one of the most transformative of those commitments.
A $10 million gift to Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso established the Gayle Greve Hunt School of Nursing, and in 2016 the foundation followed with $25 million to create the Woody L. Hunt School of Dental Medicine, the region’s first dental school, which opened in 2021.
Gayle has noted with pride that the vast majority of the nursing school’s graduates stay in El Paso.
Last year, at the groundbreaking for the Fox Cancer Center, West Texas’s first comprehensive cancer center, Josh Hunt announced a $5 million gift to establish the Hunt Medical Oncology Clinic, the first contribution to the university’s Building Hope campaign. “We see this not just as an investment in the facility,” he said, “but as an investment in people, in patients and our families.”
Just weeks before the fieldhouse announcement, the foundation also gave $1.1 million to the University Medical Center of El Paso Foundation to improve the patient experience in UMC’s main emergency department.
Education has been the other great constant, from the classroom to the university.
The foundation helped launch CREEED, a nonprofit working to raise student achievement across El Paso, with an initial $12 million gift and an $8 million follow-on, then renewed its support with another $10 million commitment.
It has endowed scholarships for Borderplex students at UT Austin, where the university matched the family’s gift, and at UTHealth Houston’s School of Public Health in El Paso. And at UTEP, the campus where Woody’s parents both earned accounting degrees and where he and Gayle met, the Hunts made the largest gift in the university’s history: $25 million in 2022, renaming the Woody L. Hunt College of Business and positioning it to lead in U.S.-Mexico trade and commerce.
That gift built on decades of support, including the Hunt Institute for Global Competitiveness, an entrepreneurship endowment honoring Woody’s parents, Jack and Dorothy Hunt, and endowed programs named for the couple’s son, Marcus Jonathan Hunt.
The family’s commitments to quality of life are where the fieldhouse most naturally belongs.
The foundation pledged $5 million to La Nube, El Paso’s downtown STEAM discovery center, sponsoring its signature attraction, the Anything’s Possible Climber, a four-story structure billed as the tallest inclusive indoor climber in Texas and designed so that children who use wheelchairs can play alongside everyone else.
It has supported the El Paso Museum of Art, the city’s food bank and mental health care.
Earlier this year, it gave $625,000 to renovate the YWCA’s Dorothy Woodley Hunt Branch in the Lower Valley, which serves about 2,100 families a year and carries the name of Woody’s mother.
“This branch carries my mother’s name, and with it, her deep belief in lifting up families and strengthening communities here in El Paso,” he said.
Josh added that his grandmother “believed deeply in the power of community and the importance of creating spaces where families could thrive.”
Sports, too, have become part of that civic picture. When UTEP prepared to move into the Mountain West Conference, the foundation stepped forward first, with a $2.5 million leadership pledge that Josh described as “not just an investment in athletics” but in “the economic vitality of El Paso.”
The Hunts were also early backers of the Deck Plaza itself, listing the Downtown Deck Plaza Foundation among their grantees well before this week’s announcement.
The fieldhouse gift also reflects a family deliberately passing the work forward. Woody, the foundation’s chairman, and Josh, its president, now co-sign the annual letter, and Gayle has long brought the next generations into the habit of giving.
When their children were small, she took them each Christmas to the Giving Tree at Cielo Vista Mall to choose a child and buy gifts.
Today, family meetings include the grandchildren, who choose their own charitable projects.
“You have to start that education when you’re young,” she has said.
Woody has expressed the hope that the foundation will stay focused on the region “whether we’re here or not.”
The Deck Plaza still has work ahead.
Organizers estimate design and construction at $207 million, plus roughly $32 million for the retaining walls that will hold up the deck; they report $74.15 million committed so far, including $35 million in private philanthropy for park amenities, along with state, regional, federal, and county funds.
The next step is city approval of a plan to build the deck’s structural elements into the Texas Department of Transportation’s I-10 widening.
Backers project as many as 1.5 million visitors a year and $1 billion in economic activity over three decades.
“We are deeply grateful for the Hunt family’s generosity and longstanding commitment to our Borderplex region,” said Tracy Yellen, president of the Downtown Deck Plaza Foundation.
For the Hunts, the fieldhouse is a natural extension of a conviction Woody has voiced for years: good jobs, strong schools, quality healthcare, and a vibrant civic life are all connected, and a city must keep investing in itself to compete.
If the plaza rises as planned, that belief may become most visible on a gym floor above the freeway, crowded with El Paso kids who no longer have to leave home to play on a court worthy of them.