From the Executive Director

Today, we launch Our Campaign for Sustainability, an audacious endeavor that will keep HMI on the leading edge of educational innovation. In ten years, over 600 students have been transformed—in large ways and small—by spending time here and engaging with the land and with our faculty. HMI has a national reputation for providing best-of-class wilderness education alongside traditional academics. We have beaten the odds, becoming one of the few non-profits that crosses the chasm from being a dream in the founders' minds to being a relevant and stable institution turning that dream into daily reality.

HMI was founded with a vision of combining the best of traditional and wilderness education. Today, the influence of this powerful combination on our students is clearer than ever. Students in our Rocky Mountain Semester, Leading Edge and High Peaks Adventure programs consistently rise to the challenge of transferring the lessons of the wilderness to the rest of their lives. After leaving HMI, alumni report increased confidence, academic performance, affinity for positive communities, and passion for exercising leadership skills.

Despite the successes of our first decade, however, there is much work to be done.

Now, I ask you to join us in the effort to make sure that the experience we provide today remains intact for future generations. HMI is at a watershed moment. Our current capital campaign is the first step toward insuring that your grandchild will have the opportunity to climb Mt. Massive and write a successful English essay about the journey. Our Campaign for Sustainability will enable us to complete our campus, establish a permanent endowment and plan for a future that includes a diverse group of students and faculty.

We are grateful for the trust you have given HMI—to care for your children, to teach you new things and to expand your horizons. Now, we are asking you to give again. Your gift to the campaign will sustain the unique experience found here for years to come. Because of this critical need to guarantee our future, HMI is seeking significant campaign gifts from alumni, families and friends in addition to the annual giving so generously provided by many of you each year.

If you believe—as we do—that HMI's ability to transform lives will be as powerful in fifty years as it is today, please join the entire HMI Board of Trustees, many alumni families, numerous HMI employees, and me and Molly in supporting this audacious and important campaign. With your gift, we can create more than a dynamic educational non-profit, more than a unique school for teaching academics and wilderness: We can create an institution of permanence.

Join us!

Christopher Barnes, Executive Director