Help us raise $5,000,000 to ensure the SRT's future
Logjams and sinkholes, and trees...
Sometimes, the problems start with a sinkhole...The story of the Stewardship Fund
At Schuylkill River Greenways, we love building trail miles, refurbishing historic railroad bridges, and cutting ribbons on new projects. Thankfully, so do our many grant funders, from the federal government to private foundations.
Each year, though, we have to divert funds from building trail to maintaining the trail from the Montgomery County line just outside Pottstown, to its eventual terminus in Frackville Schuylkill County. When a sinkhole happens, or a logjam happens, or a catastrophic storm hits our region, we are responsible to returning the trail to the safe and accessible resource that communities depend on. The money for those projects comes from our trails operating budget and it is stretched thin. Every dollar diverted creates a delay in not only building trail, but also in being able to obtain grant funding for that work.
Your gift will help us reach our goal!
The Stewardship Fund will assure that we have sufficient funding for the critical large repair and upgrade projects that are not covered by grants or our membership fund. The Stewardship Fund will ensure we have flexible funds that we can quickly direct to unanticipated projects which require immediate and expert attention. The Fund will provide a stable funding source to ensure we can take on the bigger repair projects – like resurfacing trails, repairing bridges, or removing fallen trees after each bad storm or tree blight. As we create and connect more trails throughout the region, the need for dedicated funding to repair and upgrade these extraordinary community amenities grows. We anticipate that the cost of doing so will be $4.3M over the next ten years. This is in addition to funds needed to complete new trail projects which are largely supported by government funding.
A creative solution
A word from our Executive Director, Elaine Schaefer:
The Stewardship Fund will provide the resources necessary to both move forward with trail completion, and keep up with all the maintenance and emergency issues that inevitably happen.
The Stewardship Fund will operate akin to an endowment fund. Once we achieve our goal of $5 million dollars, that sum will remain untouched in an investment account. The interest and earnings from that account will be used each year to cover our out-of-the-ordinary maintenance expenses, without touching the corpus of the Fund. With this approach, we will have a sustainable source of income to cover these relentless expenses without jeopardizing our trail building efforts.
