When the National Park Foundation announced a $100 million grant from the Lilly Endowment last month, it was not only the largest award in the organization’s nearly 60-year history, but also the latest in a series of fundraising coups this year for America’s national parks.
In May, Connie and Steve Ballmer gave $25 million to the foundation, which is the official nonprofit fundraising arm for the National Park Service. And in February, anonymous donors granted $40 million to help with the dire housing crisis at Yellowstone National Park.
The foundation has now raised $815 million toward its $1 billion capital campaign, ensuring it will meet its goal, and “likely” long before its 2028 deadline, said Will Shafroth, CEO of the National Park Foundation. “The opportunity is to turn $100 million into $300 million,” he said.
Yet the mega donations are also a reminder of how static government budgets have made the more than 400 parks — which span the Rocky Mountains’ stark natural beauty to iconic civil rights sites like Little Rock Central High School — more reliant on private dollars, even as visitor numbers neared record levels last year.
Federal funding for the National Park Service has been flat in recent years, limiting its ability to upgrade aging facilities, advance conservation or improve visitors’ experiences, argued Shafroth in a recent IP op-ed arguing for more philanthropic support for national parks.
“Private partnerships and individual donations are more crucial than ever to take care of these national treasures,” he wrote.
A growing fundraising engine
The National Park Service’s budget may be stagnant, but fortunately, the checks from private donors keep coming. Around 60 individuals and institutions have made gifts of $1 million or more to the National Park Foundation since 2018, according to its website.
These include a $13.4 million award from the Mellon Foundation in 2022 as part of its Monuments Project. Other institutional supporters include the Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation, Davis Family Foundation, Glenn W. Bailey Foundation, Malott Family Foundation, Carolyn and Chuck Miller Foundation and Pisces Foundation, as well as the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust.
These recent gifts — Lilly’s in particular — rival some of the largest-ever cash gifts for the parks. Robert F. Smith’s Fund II Foundation gave nearly $39 million in 2016 for projects that include preserving the former homes of Martin Luther King Jr. And Shafroth said financier David Rubenstein’s gifts over the years to restore the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument and other national icons also total around $50 million.
The foundation’s capital campaign actually marks a doubling of its ambitions from its 2016 fundraising push, whose original goal, $350 million, was quickly raised to $500 million after early success, as Tate Williams wrote for IP at the time.
The recent fundraising successes have in part been a result of the parks’ rising popularity, Shafroth said, due to post-COVID rush outdoors and the need for a refuge in a politically fractured time. “They serve as a place where we come together as a people … they’re a physical manifestation of our democracy.”
The other reason? Shafroth and his peers are better at asking for money. The network of more than 400 fundraising organizations associated with the national park system are now more experienced at explaining their work and making a case to billionaires and big institutions for supporting the nation’s parks, monuments and historic sites, he said.
“There are people with substantial means that are looking for ways to intelligently invest their dollars, kind of on a wholesale basis, if you will, and using intermediaries to retail the money out,” he said. “The foundation and our partners have elevated [our] collective game, if you will, so that we’re now in a position to do that at a greater scale than we used to.”
One goal for the new funding is to build the capacity of the parks’ fundraising network, Shafroth said, including land trusts and the roughly 250 volunteer organizations, known as “friends groups,” that typically raise money on behalf of individual parks. The foundation’s $1 billion campaign is part of a larger push with those groups to raise $3.5 billion.
Money will also back ecological efforts like restoring coral reefs at Florida’s Biscayne national park and bolstering trout populations in Western parks. Another goal is more basic: making sure park staff have places to live, such as by making use of low-income tax credits.
“Housing issues at the parks are at a crisis proportion right now,” he said.
A grant for parks, but not an environmental grant
The Lilly Endowment may seem like an unlikely candidate to give the National Park Foundation a record award. Scan its past grants and you won’t find a lot of traditional environmental groups, aside from its hometown zoo and the Nature Conservancy.
The foundation’s priorities, after all, are community development, education and youth, and religion. And it’s better known for regional funding in its home state of Indiana than for grantmaking with a national scope, although this is certainly not the first time it’s kicked in a big national commitment. See its $100 million unrestricted grant to the United Negro College Fund this January.
But the 87-year-old funder’s fast-growing endowment — powered by massive gains in Eli Lilly and Company stock — topped $62 billion last year, a 50% rise from the year before that could oblige its grantmaking to increase by an incredible $1 billion annually to meet the 5% foundation payout threshold. Getting such enormous sums out the door has, perhaps, encouraged it to interpret its directives even more broadly.
Besides, a green label is arguably a simplistic one for a grant to the National Parks Service, which also manages historic sites like Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home and the new national monument for Emmett Till.
“We do not view this as primarily an environmental grant,” said a Lilly spokesperson in a statement. “While we hope that it will be beneficial for the environment, we see it as also furthering our interests in history and culture, quality of place, and recreation.”
Lilly has made a series of grants to national cultural institutions over the last few years, including a $10 million grant to the Washington National Cathedral and $5 million for the World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The record-breaking National Parks grant is also an extension of past support for green spaces in its home state. Lilly approved more than $80 million in funding in 2023 to improve and expand public parks in Indianapolis and, even more recently, $50 million for Indiana’s state parks.
Big philanthropy’s long history with America’s outdoors
Recent mega gifts for national parks from the Ballmers, Smith and other ultra-wealthy individuals — not to mention massive foundations like Lilly and Mellon — might seem like a new level of government reliance on the largesse of philanthropists. Yet America’s richest have long been closely involved in supporting America’s outdoors.
John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of the oil baron, served as a sort of straw buyer in the then-controversial plan to create Grand Teton National Park, acquiring tens of thousands of acres that his son, Laurance, ultimately donated to the parks service in 1949.
That gift was “generationally significant,” Shafroth said. “It basically showed a way that the private sector, individuals [and] families could make something happen relative to our national treasures.” (Laurance would later help push for the creation of the National Park Foundation, giving today’s billionaires a place to send their checks.)
It’d be hard to put a dollar figure on such an award, but more recent gifts can be quantified. In 2016, Roxanne Quimby, cofounder of Burt’s Bees, donated over 87,000 acres of land worth around $75 million to create a national monument in Maine’s Northern woods.
“Not just the icing, but the cake too”
The National Park Foundation’s fundraising success has been more than matched by friends groups. Chapters in the Great Smoky Mountains, Arcadia and Yosemite have each raised more than $40 million in recent years, said Phil Francis, who served in the National Parks Service for more than 40 years and is chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
Yet that success belies a deeper funding gap. Explaining the groups’ work at staff trainings in the 1980s, Francis would tell new employees: “Here is a way to pay for the icing on the cake.” That has changed. “Now, the friends groups collectively are paying for the cake, too.”
Like the National Park Foundation itself, many are funding housing and other basic operations, filling in where government funding falls short. As Francis laid out in a March op-ed in The Hill, staffing at the national parks has dropped 13% over the past decade despite visits rising 10%.
Natural spaces not only help our ailing climate and boost mental health, they pencil out in economic terms. The discretionary budget of the parks was approximately $3.5 billion in 2023, while the economic contributions of the national parks to the U.S. economy topped $55 billion that year, according to the Department of the Interior.
“I wish I could find a business that I could invest money in and get that kind of return,” Francis said.
Instead, Congress slashed the parks budget by $150 million in 2024, though a dozen parks broke their all-time visitor records the year before and overall visits rose to 325 million. The National Park Foundation and friends groups should not be expected to make up for those shortfalls, and certainly cannot cover the roughly $15 to $20 billion in deferred maintenance the parks need. But they do help. And the friends groups can even lobby for some budgetary change.
