Buddy Huffaker, Executive Director

  • PROJECT

    Preserve key assets of Aldo Leopold’s legacy through the development of a new Center for the Foundation’s educational and outreach programming. In keeping with its mission to advance stewardship and land conservation and restoration, the new Center is a net-zero building, meeting all of its own energy needs.

  • SERVICES

    Feasibility study, plan and direct an $8.25 million nation-wide campaign.

After conducting a feasibility study, McDonald Schaefer managed an $8.25 million campaign and helped this small foundation preserve the vulnerable assets of its namesake, renowned conservation pioneer Aldo Leopold.

Although Leopold is perhaps best known for writing A Sand County Almanac, he was an extraordinary conservation visionary whose principles are more relevant today than when he defined them. With the $8.25 million they raised, the foundation built the Leopold Legacy Center, an environmental education center that was the greenest building in the world and the first certified as carbon neutral when it opened.

The foundation also used the funds raised to protect Leopold’s aging assets, including his original writings, sketches and photographs, along with the simple structure known to his family and now the public as “The Shack.”