When the Covid-19 pandemic forced the Hudson Highlands Nature Museum in Cornwall-on-Hudson to suspend educational programming in late March, the leadership and board looked to play to its strength of nature-based outdoor learning and play to support its mission of creating future stakeholders in the shared community environment.
The first opportunity to do that came in July. By scaling back the overall size and creating individual age-group pods, the museum”™s Director of Education Jenny Brinker successfully planned and ran a healthy (and infection free) eight-week summer camp for children. The response by their families was overwhelmingly positive with parents thankful their children could safely interact with other children after months of social isolation.
In September to restart the highly regarded Young Naturalist (YN) program serving almost 100 mid-Hudson families with a nature-based preschool, the Nature Museum planned to build two outdoor pavilions so that classes could spend much more time outside, even when the weather was less than ideal. Just as the Nature Museum leadership was developing its plans for new outdoor classrooms, Cornwall-on-Hudson residents Matt and Kathryn Wilhelm, proprietors of local business EKB Kitchens, reached out to encourage the Nature Museum to apply for a grant from their modest family foundation.
(The Wilhelms have been giving back to the community in this way for several years.)
Within several weeks of submitting the grant application the Nature Museum was informed that it had received a $5,000 donation. For this support the Nature Museum will name one of the pavilions in honor of the Matt and Kathryn Wilhelm Family Foundation.
Founded in 1959, the Hudson Highlands Nature Museum focuses on environmental education with a mission to develop responsible caretakers of the environment.
