Recent silence on this website has been for a very good reason—the volunteer crew working on the Bailey Center Project have been busy! In July, we successfully wrote and submitted a grant application for property acquisition funds from the New York State Office for Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation that could support up to $675,000 toward the purchase of the Bailey properties in Ithaca. In the process, we successfully solicited thirty-five letters of support for the grant. Meanwhile, in our continued conversations with officials at Cornell University, we have secured more time to fundraise…

"The Liberty Hyde Bailey Center will combat the interlinked challenges of climate change, civic unraveling, and political polarization through action-oriented dialogues across many lines of difference, educational programming, and creative projects across the sciences, arts, and humanities."

Thanks reporter Kira Walter of the The Ithaca Times for this spotlight article on The Liberty Hyde Bailey Center Project! Learn more about the history and vision of the project, and what it will do, in her full article, here.

Thanks to our partnership with Cornell Cooperative Extension Tompkins County, you can now be a part of history and join The Liberty Hyde Bailey Center as a Founding Member with any donation of $100 or more.

The vision for the Liberty Hyde Bailey Center has been born out of conversation. Central to our theory of change is that the work emerge with and alongside stakeholder communities, rather than being imposed from without, and for that reason we have long hesitated to articulate concrete programs of action. However, conversations have now been ongoing for long enough that we feel ready to share some of our current aspirations.

We are delighted to share that The Liberty Hyde Bailey Center is now officially a project of Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) Tompkins County! In their May 7 meeting, the Board of Trustees of CCE Tompkins voted to approve adoption of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Center Project in its start-up phase.

Since launching this online platform and beginning to share the project more widely just a week ago, we have been receiving many wonderful messages of support. We’ve also received the first two pledges from this stage of the campaign—one supporter in Iowa has pledged $1,000, and another supporter in Michigan has pledged $40,000.