We seek financial support to launch The Liberty Hyde Bailey Center in upstate New York, a new kind of public nonprofit institution, which will do the following:

• Address the interlinked crises of climate change and civic unravelling together, organizing and supporting multisector actions on issues that are especially urgent for rural communities.

• Bridge rural-urban, red-blue, and other polarizing divides through initiatives and programs that are co-developed with partners, working alongside local community leaders and organizations.

• Awaken and tap people’s civic talents, creativity, and imagination, using diverse interdisciplinary methods to advance the critical work of building relationships and trust to counter the corrosive polarization that stymies progress on issues of climate and inequality.

We propose to launch this work with a statewide, five-year Rural-Urban Dialogue Initiative, in close collaboration with our invited partners in Cornell University’s Ashley School for Global Development and the Environment and the Brooks School of Public Policy, in the State Legislature, in Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE), and among independent rural organizations. Guiding discussion toward strategic action, these dialogues will 1) identify a set of common problems facing rural and urban New Yorkers and help set the direction for future collaborative work between the Center and its partners; 2) surface leaders embedded in communities across the state who will help to push work on these issues forward in the future; 3) help to build a social infrastructure for ongoing dialogue and coalition-building between rural and urban that addresses and reduces political polarization and gridlock.

The work of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Center will flow from and draw on the substantial body of Bailey’s own writings and work on rural culture and ecology. Responding to the democratic crisis of the Gilded Age and born of the Progressive Era’s reformist ethos, Bailey’s work has powerful connections to our current moment of inequality, polarization, and ecological crisis, and for this reason the most important of his writings are currently being republished as a series by Cornell University Press. Through the Bailey Center, this rich corpus will stimulate the creation of new work at the intersections of climate and democracy, bringing people together across perceived divides as agents for change. Part of Bailey’s genius lay in his ability, through his writing and administrative work, to co-construct the conditions for people to gather across such divides—rural/urban, sciences/humanities, racial, gendered, political—in person, in welcoming spaces where they could be fully human. He put this philosophy and impetus into the design of his home, where generations of students, politicians, and reformers gathered and organized.

Remarkably well preserved, after several decades of renting it for student housing, Cornell University is now seeking to sell this home, with its complex of three additional structures (totaling 8,442 sq. ft.) and gardens. The university is holding these properties off the market for us at their appraised cost of $1.46M (before fees), but only until the end of July 2026. We have raised $541,200 from individual private donors to launch the center’s work, and we now seek $3M to save the properties as a cultural resource, a space to gather, and a permanent center which will disseminate resources and programming across the state.

As an independent nonprofit working in close partnership with Cornell University, where Bailey was the influential founding Dean of the New York State College of Agriculture, and with CCE’s robust statewide network, the Bailey Center will engage in the civic work that must be done to meet the social and ecological challenges of this moment in history: convening, envisioning, creating, and acting to break through multiple polarizations that divide us. The only safe political bet for the future is democracy, and democracy begins at the local level, between people. The Bailey Center will be a place for people, for gathering and radiating into the world, for the hard work of long-haul trust and dialogue. That is how we meet our moment: with a large bet on a long future.

Learn more about ten ambitious initiatives we have in mind for our first decade on our Vision of Work page.