Capital Campaign: For a Thriving Future

This is an exciting moment in the life of Boxerwood. Our organization turned 25 last year, and I keep encountering more and more evidence of what those 25 years have built. In my first year as executive director, I've met young adults who came up through Boxerwood programs and have gone on to careers in environmental work; they name their Boxerwood experience as the inspiration to pursue that work. 

Not only that: former Boxerwood students are now sending their own children through our programs — a second generation of Boxerwood-raised Earth stewards, coming home at the end of their school day to share their joy about the mud kitchen, and the ponds, and all the special Boxerwood places their parents also know. 

It’s a joy to look back on what Boxerwood has accomplished. And now we are looking forward and asking ourselves: how do we ensure that we can educate and inspire Earth stewards for another 25 years? What needs to be built so that a sixth-grader who plants a tree with us this fall can, decades from now, show that tree — tall and strong — to a child of their own?

Boxerwood’s first-ever capital campaign is our answer to that question.

The campaign rests on four priorities:

1. Our facilities: The Lodge was built in 1952, and it's showing its age in the ways that old buildings do — a roof section original to the building, water damage in the framing beneath it, drainage that hasn't kept pace with seventy years of storms. We're already in action: the last section of the original roof will be replaced this fall, along with the structural repair and drainage work behind it. Additionally, come October the Rockbridge Timber Framers will rebuild the field stage and give it a roof for the first time, so a little rain doesn't cancel a concert or a youth program.

2. Garden equipment: Good land care depends on having the right tools in good working order — and right now, we're stretched on both fronts. This campaign will fund functional equipment so our garden staff can spend their time caring for the land, not fighting with tools that make their work harder than it needs to be.

3. Protecting land: A rare opportunity has come up: ten acres adjoining our current property, adjacent to the field where we hold Music in the Garden, will soon be available. Acquiring it protects the ecological integrity of what we already have, buffers Boxerwood from incompatible neighboring development, and gives us space — for trails, for habitat, for the next 25 years of educational programming. We've applied for state grant funding through the Virginia Outdoors Foundation to help offset the cost of acquiring this land.

4. Program support: Boxerwood's programs run on more than two decades of accumulated expertise, and on partnerships with every public school in the county that we've built one relationship at a time. This part of the campaign invests in the people and systems that carry that model forward: strengthening how we train and structure our teaching staff, and deepening our role as the environmental education partner every public school in Rockbridge County can count on.

As of this month, we have $470,000 pledged toward our $500,000 goal, thanks in part to significant leadership gifts from donors who have a deep belief in the Boxerwood mission. That's the result of many quiet conversations over the past year — and now we’re going public. You'll receive a letter from us in September inviting you to be part of it all, but if you're ready now, we’re happy to receive your gift of any size at boxerwood.monkeypod.io/give/cc

Boxerwood has never been the kind of place that runs on any one person, any one gift, or any one grant. It runs on generations of people deciding that this place and its mission are worth investing in. I hope you'll consider yourself one of them.

Onwards,

Ben Eland

Executive Director