Longacres Alumni Page - Click here to return to "Alumni Page"
"Friends of Longacres" - giving and donations -
The Longacres Riding Camp: 1939 - 2009
Below - our 2008-9 "Friends of Longacres" message
The 2007 message is further down the page.
If you've read the "Longacres Alumni Page" and our current news pages on the website, you know that things are going very well at Longacres. Our budget for annual expenses is balanced and new students have to sign up almost a year in advance to get into our regular camp sessions. (At least until this recession year, and we're still nearly full for the July & August weeks.)
But money is still a big issue in our master plans. To have nearly 71 years of Longacres tradition is a good thing. But to have buildings and facilities 70 years old leads to occasional very expensive maintenance issues. Many of you are in business yourselves, and it doesn't take more than five minutes with a pencil to see that a camp program with only nine students and a few CIT's is hard pressed to cover routine expenses, let alone major maintenance!
It may seem odd for a privately owned small business to be asking for donations. But Longacres is an "odd" small business. As most of you regulars know, it is a labor of love for us to keep Longacres going after 70 years in our family. And to maintain the very unusual small family farm style riding program that makes us unique. It is no accident that camps offering five hours of riding and showing for everyone are few and far between. They do not make economic sense without special support. Tom and Meghan usually take under $20,000 a year out of the Longacres business and live a modest, but comfortable life with the help of some outside income.
In a way, we think of "Friends of Longacres" giving to be a form of multi-tiered tuition. Neither Tom nor Meghan grew up in wealthy families, and we very much want Longacres to remain affordable to some middle class families who are willing to sacrifice a bit. We do not want to become a place that is only for the very rich. If you can afford to contribute something - to pay a little more than the base tuition, it means we can keep our basic tuition a little lower a little longer, and have a more diverse group of students join our family every year.
If your family is in a position to make a contribution as a "Friend of Longacres", along with your tuition payment, Longacres will be grateful. Such contributions will allow us to keep our tuition rate from becoming unaffordable. (continued other side)
We are grateful to those of you who contributed as a "Friend of Longacres" in some way during the past couple of seasons. We had several who made helpful cash donations towards the cost of our new barn roof and the major dining hall renovations. We have had valued contributions of time and effort from some with special skills helping to open and improve the farm. We had a major gift covering most of the construction of new bridges around the farm last year. We have had help caring for horses that otherwise might not have found a winter home. Many of you sponsored high score awards in the Summer Horse Show Series. More than a dozen parents of current students plus a few other Friends of Longacres helped in some way last year. Anything at all is a help and is appreciated!
In addition to larger cash contributions to our general and maintenance funds or for a new projecxt like our proposed sand ring, you can sponsor horse show High Score Awards for a $150 donation for a division; you can be an Awards Party Patron for a $100 donation. And if you have special skills that could be of help to the farm, give us a call.
A Longacres 2010 “Wish List”
We recently had a nice offer from a satisfied parent to make a donation to cover some of our special improvement expenses for next year. This is a good time to remind you all that gifts of time or money from Longacres alumni and “Friends of Longacres” are an important part of what keeps Longacres going year after year. Your regular camp tuition pays for the regularly budgeted expenses of running the camp each season. But gifts of various kinds help us immensely. In the past three years we’ve had gifts to help with the new barn roof, the rebuilding of the dining hall, the new bridges around the farm, and Gina Bennett’s incredible Butterfly Jump and Light House jump painting projects. Read about “Friends of Longacres” at this link.
Here is a “wish list” and discussion of some of the special expenses we face in the coming year.
The sand ring was hugely useful this year. We built it small this spring to see how we’d like it. We are expanding it by 50% and adding deeper sand to improve the footing for next season. The cost will be about $4000.
We have built a major new jump each year for the past few years and we will again this year. The new stone wall and “Castles” jump will cost over $2500, and we’ll be spending an additional $1500 on smaller new jumps and replacement jump rails and cups for next season.
We had planned to move and refurbish the old Junior Barn this year at a cost of about $10,000. We put this off at least until next year as a money saving move when the economy went bad this year. We’d still like to do this project, but will need a full enrollment next year (likely!), or some help to do this project.
We made major improvements to the barn driveway in 2008 and had planned to do the same to the office driveway during the current 2009 season, but we put this project off to save money this year. This is about a $2500 project, we hope to do before the 2010 season.
Longacres occasionally gives financial assistance to students based on need or merit. We would do this more often if we had the resources.
We bought three new horses this year and average two a year. We consider horse replacement to be part of our routine annual budget, but if someone would like to sponsor the purchase of our next horse, our average cost when we purchase a new green horse for training is $2500.
The dining hall foundations, walls, siding, painting, and other improvements were done in 2007 and 2008. The roofing was patched last year, but the building needs a new roof at a cost of $10,000 to $12,000. We must do this next year if possible.
New: Turns out we need to do a major repair to the roof of Pixie – Oakwood guest cabin right away this fall. It’s one of those things we tried not to notice until it was really leaking the past few weeks. We tore it open last night and will be working for the next week putting in new rafters and roofing material over a large part of the valley between the two rooms. More money for the maintenance budget! Maybe $2000 for this surprise!
We made major additions to our system of horse trails this past year. We can always use another dump truck load of gravel to improve muddy spots on the trails! This kind of gravel costs us about $240 a truck load. Anyone who wants to sponsor a load of gravel, we will tell you which bad spot on the trails YOU improved!!!!
I thought you might be interested in what those last few dollars of your tuition check pay for. These are the big things that we do in a good year, or when we get a little help from a “friend of Longacres”, or when the need exists and we just can’t wait any longer.
Best wishes to you all!
2007 Friends of Longacres message, below:
If you've read the "Longacres Alumni Page" and our current news page, you know that things are going very well at Longacres. Our annual budget is balanced and new students have to sign up almost a year in advance to get into our regular camp sessions.
But money is still a big issue in our master plans. To have nearly 70 years of Longacres tradition is a good thing. But to have buildings and facilities 70 years old is a potentially very expensive maintenance issue.
We are beginning to explore the idea of accepting donations from Alumni and friends who have had good experiences at Longacres to help with these large occasional maintenance expenses. And perhaps scholarship funding. - (Longacres already routinely gives modest financial aid to deserving girls and we wish we could do more.)
In 2007 we face the special expense of a new $17,000 barn roof and more than $20,000 for reconstruction of the 70 year old dining hall foundations. Some of you have expressed interest in supporting these projects. We would be pleased to talk with others.
Some Hard, Basic Math:
The hard truth is that a very small camp like Longacres must maintain all the same facilities as a much larger traditional camp on a fraction of the tuition income.
Although we are experimenting with adding an additional week or two in late May and June, our budget assumes ten weeks with nine paying students. That's ninety weeks of tuition or a little more, or just over $100,000 gross income.
Although supporting Longacres would not be possible at all if Meghan and I did not have some outside income, we do need to take a little out of the business to support a modest middle class lifestyle for ourselves. That leaves less than $100,000 to cover the annual operating budget of the Longacres farm. It is enough, but just barely - NOT counting the occasional big ticket items like barn roofs and dining hall foundations.
There are only a few options for maintaining the long term success of the program. One would be selling off significant parts of the land here to raise capital. We may do this in a limited way, but if we sell very much it will diminish the Longacres experience. A second option is to raise tuition quite a lot. With our unique program, this might work - but it is not what we want to do. We know that an equestrian horse show program like ours at Longacres is something for reasonably affluent families already and we accept that. But we would be very sorry to have Longacres become a place that only the children of the very rich could afford.
The other option is Alumni support. The steady stream of Alumni letters telling us how much Longacres meant to many students in their youth tells us that there may be enough Alumni loyalty to help defray some of the special expenses we face from time to time. This year would be a good time for some of that to materialize!
Brown Ledge Camp in Vermont, one of the old and successful New England camps, was not long ago sold to a non profit Corporation funded by former campers. A Board of Directors provides for the continued operation of the camp. Something like that might be in Longacres future as we reach our 75th Diamond Jubilee in six years. In the meantime, any "giving" to support necessary unusual Longacres expenses will have to be informal.
Our guideline will be that normal annual operating expenses should continue to be funded out of the regular tuition income from each year's students. Any Alumni gifts would be kept segregated from our normal business accounts and would be used exclusively to fund identified special maintenance projects. (or scholarship aid with the approval of the donors.) Anyone making a gift to this fund would become a part of our informal "Board of Directors" and would be given appropriate accounting.
If you are interested in supporting Longacres with a special gift for the above uses, contact Tom or Meghan at this link.
Thank you!