Make a Charitable Donation

 

Make a Charitable Donation 

We have the ambitious goal of expanding and enriching our school field trip offerings at our Orrington village in 2020. Your support can move us closer to that goal. We saw more than 2100 school visitors in 2019 at our Newfield village, and that means that teachers from more than two dozen schools regularly chose our hands-on experiential programming for their students. Now we wish to share that same programming, while also developing new additions, to people of the greater Bangor area and beyond. This requires improvements on our existing infrastructure in Orrington as well as new construction.

Whether it be hand cranking a wooden washing machine and wringing out the water with a hand crank wringer, turning cream into butter, turning the handle of a burr mill and producing cracked corn that you get to feed to chickens, sending a message in Morse code using a telegraph key, using your manners in the little red schoolhouse,  turning a electromagnet to produce a shock or making a diagnosis using X-rays, lifting a 100 pound anvil with a pulley system, using a lever to draw water from a well, pulling the handle of a letterpress to print, simulating the power of a horse on a treadmill, or our newest learning activity ===our Model T Assembly Line that offers a simulation of the real thing and an exploration of teamwork and efficient work choices. And there is much more… These are some of the many formal and informal experiences that don’t happen in classrooms but  continue to happen for school children at 19th Century Curran Villages with your donation. Help us to expand and enrich the experiences for our future.

We are setting the bar high with a goal of raising $11,000 before year’s end; the motivation for this is a $5500 Matching Gift Challenge from an anonymous donor.A $5500 Matching Fund Challenge has been pledged by another anonymous donor for our ongoing ANNUAL FUND DRIVE. If you recall, this is our third challenge this year from various donors with more than $20,000 successfully raised through the generosity of contributors like you.

This MATCHING FUND CHALLENGE, if met with your generous donation by February 2020 will result in $11,000 towards our ANNUAL FUND.

The ANNUAL FUND assists us in meeting the significant cost of consolidating our two museum villages in 2020 and completing an infrastructure capable of maintaining our collections, providing hands-on educational programming to school visitors, offering regular traditional arts and S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) learning objective workshops for children and adults, and celebrating the seasons with our special events at Orrington, Maine. It is our goal to ultimately fulfill our ongoing mission:

19th Century Curran Villages at Orrington and Newfield is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that collects, preserves and utilizes historic artifacts and buildings for exhibition, living history, traditional arts programming and hands-on education. The villages serve as classrooms to not only raise awareness and appreciation of life in rural Maine and New England during the emerging Industrial Age of the 19th and early 20th centuries but to empower new generations through sharing the lessons of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics from that time to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Our goal is to help to nurture future inventors, scientists, mechanics and agriculturists through individual awareness and discovery.

If we can achieve that imagine what we can do to make memorable learning experiences for this and future generations. 

Using Lessons from the Past for Today’s and Tomorrow’s Challenges