PALM BEACH COUNTY / INSTITUTIONS / INSPIRATION
Jeff Stoops
What a community
needs in place.
By Rob Urban
When Jeff Stoops told his wife he was leaving his law firm for a company in an emerging industry, Aggie had a practical question: did the new job include health insurance?
They had four young children. Two were twins. The question was entirely reasonable.
Stoops recounted the exchange in a Florida State University profile. His relationship with SBA Communications had begun when its founder, Steve Bernstein, called the law firm about a potential deal. Stoops handled the call, advised him, and eventually joined the business. He helped it move toward owning communications towers, a direction that would shape the company’s future.
That career made substantial philanthropy possible for the Stoops family. What interests me about the giving is its range: social work, education, services for autistic adults, children’s needs, and the performing arts. The projects do different things, but many address a similar question. What does someone need in place to participate more fully in a life, a profession, or a community?
For a man whose business involved infrastructure, that seems like a useful question to keep asking.
From towers
to community
institutions.
Stoops served as SBA’s CEO from 2002 through 2023 and remains its chairman. The Community Foundation for Palm Beach and Martin Counties also identifies him as its vice chair and immediate past chair, following his 2023–2026 term leading the board. His work in Palm Beach County has extended well beyond the Boca Raton company’s offices.
Jeff and Aggie formed the Stoops Family Foundation in 2013. The community foundation lists support for organizations including HomeSafe, Quantum House, the Hanley Foundation, the Kravis Center, Place of Hope, and The Lord’s Place. These are relationships with organizations already doing specialized work, rather than one new institution expected to do everything.
Aggie’s experience
belongs in the story.
Aggie brings a different professional grounding to that work. Her FSU Foundation biography records bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work and an early career in child welfare. She began that work in the Tallahassee area while Jeff was finishing law school. They moved to Palm Beach County in 1984, and she continued serving local nonprofits while raising their family.
The biography identifies her as chair of the family foundation and describes its early support for the university’s center focused on communities, families, and children. Her training brings an understanding of the institutions a family may encounter when it needs help. That experience belongs in any account of how the foundation chooses its work.
The combination is compelling: someone accustomed to financing and running a large company working alongside someone trained to understand people within families and social systems. Philanthropy needs both attention to the institution and attention to the person who arrives there needing help.
A sink. A counter.
Room to try again.
At the Els Center of Excellence in Jupiter, the Stoops Family Adult Services Building contains spaces designed for practical learning. One suite includes bedrooms, bathrooms, a laundry room, a kitchenette, and a living area, arranged to support instruction in both household and hospitality skills.
Elsewhere in the building are a café used for vocational learning, a woodworking lab, and the Sea of Possibilities workshop, where autistic adults make ocean-inspired art for sale. The building’s design also considers sound, lighting, and color.
These details make the purpose much easier to grasp than a phrase such as “adult services.” Someone can practice a task in a setting built for it. There is a sink, a counter, a work area, and room to repeat the process. The activity has a recognizable relationship to life beyond the classroom.
Adulthood
deserves
its own
attention.
The organization’s adult program description dates the building’s opening to 2023 and explains the broader services around it. Employment support includes exploring possible careers, preparing for interviews, and receiving job coaching. Independent living and social programs focus on individual strengths, interests, and needs. Community outings bring practice into ordinary places such as stores, parks, and restaurants.
The continuation into adulthood is central. A person’s opportunities should not become smaller simply because school has ended. The building gives the professionals who do this work a place equipped for a stage of life that requires its own attention.
The Stoops family’s name marks support for that capacity. The day-to-day instruction belongs to the staff, and each participant’s ambitions remain their own. The value of the gift continues in work carried out by people with their own knowledge, responsibilities and hopes.
The mothers
made the pictures.
Another project shows the family’s support reaching a very different setting: a public library exhibition.
In June 2025, Florida State University reported on a traveling Palm Beach County exhibit from its Stoops Center for Communities, Families, and Children. It grew from research involving mothers affected by substance use and the child welfare system. Through a method called Photovoice, participants used photography and discussion to document their experiences.
The exhibit included photographs by two participants. Researchers Ellen Piekalkiewicz and Heather Howard described the importance of supportive, coordinated care and of hearing the mothers’ perspectives. Jeff and Aggie attended the unveiling.
There is something valuable in that change of viewpoint. People discussed in policy meetings become people making images and explaining what those images mean. A library visitor encounters their account rather than only a description of their circumstances written by someone else.
Supporting an institution that makes such work possible has a different rhythm from sponsoring a single event. Researchers need time, partners, and places to share what they learn. The public exhibition is one visible result of a longer investment in that ability.
The evening begins
before the performance.
Stoops has also served as chair of the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts. In a 2019 Coastal Star interview, he spoke enthusiastically about its renovation: expanded lobby space, technical improvements, parking, and easier movement into and out of the venue.
That is a refreshingly operational answer from someone being interviewed about an arts institution. A performance begins onstage, but an audience’s evening begins much earlier. The building has to work. People need to get inside, find their way, and return often enough for the institution to remain part of their lives.
His giving and board service connect him with people whose work appears elsewhere in this Inspiration Series, including Charles Bender at Place of Hope. Their responsibilities differ. One leads the programs; another helps sustain the resources and institutions those programs require.
I admire the willingness to care about what happens after a gift is announced. An institution has to keep its doors open, prepare its staff, maintain its rooms and notice what the people using it need next. Supporting that work means taking an interest in the ordinary days that follow a generous gesture.
Stoops’s story is worth following beyond the scale of his business success. It reaches a vocational practice room in Jupiter, a university research center, a library wall, and a theater lobby in West Palm Beach. The interesting part is what becomes possible in those places once the money has been put to work.
About Jeff and Aggie Stoops
Who is Jeff Stoops?
Jeff Stoops is chairman of SBA Communications, where he served as CEO from 2002 through 2023. He and his wife, Aggie, established the Stoops Family Foundation in 2013.
What is the Stoops Family Adult Services Building?
Opened in 2023 at the Els Center of Excellence in Jupiter, Florida, it provides purpose-built spaces for autistic adults to practice vocational, household and social skills.
What experience does Aggie Stoops bring to the foundation?
Aggie Stoops earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work at Florida State University and worked in child welfare. She chairs the Stoops Family Foundation.
Sources: Florida State University’s profiles and June 2025 exhibit report; the Community Foundation for Palm Beach and Martin Counties; Els for Autism’s building and program descriptions; and Brian Biggane’s 2019 Coastal Star interview. Checked September 2026. Reflections are Rob Urban’s.
I write about the decisions that help good work continue. For more of my thinking, or a conversation about your own organization, meet Rob.