Natural direction | After more than 40 years with one of Maine's premier environmental groups, Don Hudson breaks camp
Photo/Tim Greenway
Don Hudson will step down as president of the Chewonki Foundation in July
Don Hudson is excited and a little anxious when he thinks about the day after he concludes his 19-year tenure as president of the Chewonki Foundation on July 12.
“I’m not sure I’ll know what to do when I wake up in the morning,” says Hudson, who sported a blue flannel vest and red and white Hawaiian shirt in his Wiscasset campus office.
Hudson has worked at Chewonki, a nonprofit education center that teaches young people about Maine’s natural resources and stewardship, for 44 years. In June, he celebrates his 60th birthday and once retired, intends to occupy his time building a canoe with the help of Jerry Stelmock, owner of Island Falls Canoe Co. in Atkinson, and taking an Arctic cruise in September.
“I kind of like the idea of not having too many hard and fast plans,” says Hudson, who will still serve on Chewonki’s advisory board and help with various projects when new president Willard Morgan takes the helm. Hudson also serves on the board of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland and with the Allagash Wilderness Waterway Advisory Council.
The Chewonki Foundation traces its roots back to 1915 when it was a boys’ camp with a few tents on Lake Champlain in Vermont. Today, the group arranges for more than 40,000 children to participate in summer camps each year, through programs that range from one hour to an entire spring or fall semester.
When kids go to Chewonki summer camp, the staff collects all of their MP3 players, iPods, smart phones and other electronic devices and puts them in a safe so kids can have “a time out from those things in our lives,” says Hudson. The kids often thank the staff when they go home.
Spending time in the Maine woods has always been therapeutic for Hudson and he loves teaching kids how to achieve that same inner peace. “It’s the way I kind of decompress,” he says.
When Hudson started working at Chewonki as a counselor in 1966, he says there was just one full-time employee, a few buildings and some cabins. Under his stewardship, Chewonki now has more than 70 employees, most of whom work full time, year-round. That number swells by 110 to nearly 200 in the summer. The group has a $5 million annual budget, 90% of which is funded by tuition and fees and the remaining 10% comes from donations.
One of his most challenging times as president came with the current recession; gift giving and contributions have been down for the past three years. Hudson says it has been difficult for the staff to reach annual fundraising goals and they had to cut a few positions over that period. Maintaining Chewonki’s educational programs and public service with the right level of staff and funding is a constant challenge.
But there have been many successes, says Hudson. Chewonki walks the walk of being an eco-friendly campus that uses renewable energy, grows and consumes organic food on its farm and respects the environment.
Hudson was recently awarded a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Lifetime Merit Achievement Award and the Espy Land Heritage Award, but he places much greater value on the e-mails, tweets, Facebook postings and letters he receives from scores of adults thanking him and the staff for teaching them about the environment and nature when they were schoolchildren or attended summer camp.
“I think we have managed to get the message out there,” he says in his office, which includes hundreds of books, maps and a painting by Roger Tory Peterson, a counselor who worked at Chewonki in the 1930s, of an osprey, Chewonki’s symbol. “We make better decisions about those resources when we have those connections.”
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