Become a Founding Member
Be a part of history and join The Liberty Hyde Bailey Center as a Founding Member.
Founding Members don’t just help us reach our goal to save the Bailey properties in Ithaca and launch the Bailey Center’s work—they also demonstrate a proof of concept, showing major donors that there is a community of support behind this effort. Moreover, your gift today, however large or small, helps establish something permanent and lasting for the public good: it is an investment in a long future for our democracy and our planet, not to mention upstate New York. (To read about some of our dreams for our first ten years, click here.)
Read more about becoming a Founding Member below, or donate now.
Above: photograph, taken by Bailey, showing the door leading from the horse-stable-turned-office into the greenhouse at the Bailey property in Ithaca. The door and both structures still stand, and we propose restoring them. Courtesy of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum & Gardens, South Haven, Michigan.
Banner image: photograph of the faculty and students of the Nature-Study Summer School at Cornell University, ca. 1898, with Bailey seated in roughly the third row, center, hat in hand. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Founding Membership Tiers
Founding Member
$100 and up
All Founding Members (all tier levels) will be recognized on a plaque in the Bailey Center and will be invited to a launch event we hope to host sometime in 2027.
Garden Lover
$1,000 and up
In addition to Founding Member benefits, Garden Lovers receive a complimentary copy of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener’s Companion, personally signed by co-editors John A. Stempien and John Linstrom.
Sustaining Steward
$10,000 and up
In addition to Founding Member benefits, Sustaining Stewards receive a Bailey Bundle of Books—together with the Gardener’s Companion, also The Holy Earth (centennial edition) and The Nature-Study Idea, all signed by their editors.
Country Lifer
$100,000 and up
In addition to all other tier benefits, Country Lifers become members of the Bailey Center for life, with full membership access to all programs and events in perpetuity.
Seven-figure gifts and up will be eligible for naming opportunities connected to restored structures or program series—please contact us to inquire.
“If successful, we believe the Liberty Hyde Bailey Center could provide a model to be emulated and adapted by every land-grant university and state in the country. It meets people in their communities, where they are, and gives them the structure and foundation on which to build meaningful change—change that will last, that takes place over the scale of generations rather than political terms, but the effects of which will already be felt within the first five years of this project.”
— Theodore Roosevelt IV
Your Questions, Answered
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We are an ambitious team of volunteers and members of Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) Tompkins County concerned about the intersections of democratic and ecological health, seeking to leverage Liberty Hyde Bailey’s voluminous body of work and save his historic home as a unique platform to co-construct a brighter future for our planet and our communities. We invite you to read a description of our project on our About the Project page. Descriptions of ten programmatic ambitions for the first decade are available on our Vision of Work page.
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Yes. In its start-up phase, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Center is a project of CCE Tompkins, an independent 501c3 nonprofit organization within the New York State Cooperative Extension network, a venerable institution with 113 years of history in Tompkins County. All contributions are fully tax-deductible.
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We will mail the relevant books to donors shortly after achiving our goal of securing the Liberty Hyde Bailey properties in Ithaca and launching the Center, hopefully by the end of the summer of 2026.
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In the event that we fail to launch the Liberty Hyde Bailey Center, all donations will be directly refunded by CCE Tompkins.