Evergreen Foundation Needs Your Help

By: Jim Petersen

Dear Friends of Evergreen:

The non-profit Evergreen Foundation needs your help. Our cash reserves are at their lowest point since our founding 25 years ago. We have about $5,000 in the bank – enough to get us through the next 30 days.

Over the last year, I have personally donated $24,000 to the Foundation – and I continue to donate my time to our forestry education mission, as I have for almost five years. Put simply, I am unwilling to throw in the towel. We have come too far and we have too much invested to turn back now. Besides, I know of no other forestry education program in North America that enjoys the credibility we enjoy or has earned the reputation for quality that we have earned since 1986.

We have invested heavily in our website – www.evergreenmagazine.com – and it has paid off handsomely. Tracking tools imbedded in the site’s architecture tell us that ours is very likely the most visited forest website in the U.S. and Canada. We continue to work hard to keep the site fresh. New material is posted weekly. We would do it even more often if we had sufficient budget to cover correspondent fees, but we don’t – yet.

We have been asked repeatedly if we have plans to update “The Truth About America’s Forests” in print and web formats. The answer is an emphatic, yes! In fact, we are in discussions with a potential funder now. Wish us luck. Our last update was completed eight years ago. It is long past time upgrade the report. In its first seven renditions, more than one million copies were distributed, free, across these United States.

The support we seek from you will help us pay our routine monthly bills - utilities, web site fees, our one-person office staff –all critical to our website and planning for the future. In a perfect world, we would raise $50,000 over the next 30 days – an amount sufficient to run the office and the website for another year. I know of no better bargain in forestry education today.

We do have some exciting GOOD NEWS to share with you. One of our long-time supporters has donated his fully restored 1965 Chris Craft Cavalier to the Foundation. You can see it on our website. She’s named “Dreamboat” and she’s a real beauty. She was recently appraised for insurance purposes at $75,000 (& comes with a trailer!) We are currently soliciting bids on our site, so if you’d like to submit one, please do so. If we get a serious offer this year, we’ll sell her, but if we don’t we’ll raffle her off next year.

Rest assured, we intend to soldier on just as we have for the last 25 years – telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about forests and forestry in the United States and around the world. But we need your immediate help to do it, so please consider a donation in the next 30 days. Please find a form at www.evergreenmagazine.com. Filling it out gets you into our system so that we can send you a letter that acknowledges your tax deductible contribution. Thanks a million.

Sincerely,
Jim Petersen
Co-founder and Executive Director
The non-profit Evergreen Foundation