A little-known group of people who quietly raise money for the national parks, individually and as a system, met at Mesa Verde National Park last Friday and Saturday. Except for the brief visit by their locally famous chairman, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, the annual meeting of the board of directors of the National Park Foundation might have gone unnoticed.

As a nonprofit organization, the Foundation is today’s version of the National Park Trust, established in 1935 to convey private donations of land, gifts and funds to the National Park System. Recast as a fund-raising partner of the National Park Service by a 1967 Act of Congress, the NPF now consists of five officers (including Babbitt and Bob Stanton, director of the National Park Service), 20 board members (among whom are David Rockefeller, Jr., chairman of Rockefeller & Co.; Donald H. Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense; and Benjamin Montoya, president & CEO of Public Service Company of New Mexico), and 18 Active NPF Alumni, who serve in an advisory capacity. Among this last group are former Congressman and Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan, Jr., Nancy Clark Reynolds, a board member with the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, and Bruce Dines, retired director of Colorado Bank.

Most of the participants in the Mesa Verde meeting don’t spend much time in remote areas. On a hike to Petroglyph Point, several remarked on the silence of the piñon/juniper forest at midmorning. Others mused about the challenge of growing corn in such a hot, dry, high land. One hiker, who works with the Department of Agriculture’s Century Farm Program, was challenged to think of Pueblo Indians as Millennium Farmers. Another was reminded of her days as a child at Grand Canyon National Park, where her father was on the administrative staff.

In addition to the necessary thrashing out of budget items, which could be done in a Manhattan board room, the Foundation board visited the archeological sites, toured the collections and research center, learned about the ongoing research into past civilizations at Mesa Verde, and had time to talk informally with park staff and at least three regional directors of the National Park Service.

Public Law 90-209 directs the Foundation "to accept and administer" private gifts of property or money to support the National Park Service. In practice, this means both service-wide and specific park support. In 1996, for example, the Foundation accepted $475,000 worth of trucks from Toyota, U.S.A., to benefit 20 national parks across the country. The Foundation launched a Housing Initiative to help improve employee living conditions. The recently announced National Parks Pass is a program administered by the Foundation for the National Park Service.

Locally, the National Park Foundation provided the means for $250,000 from the Mobil Corporation to reach the Save America’s Treasures project at Mesa Verde National Park. This money, along with donations from Tauck Travel, the American Express Foundation, and other private and public sources, will be used to document, stabilize and monitor archeological resources at Mesa Verde.

Park employees can apply for grants to support graduate education, specialized skills training and other professional development.

Individual parks can apply for "seed money" grants — designed to get a project launched — or challenge grants, which usually are matched at least dollar for dollar by money or in-kind contributions from other sources.

Some Foundation funds support "Parks as Classrooms" — park-based education programs like the Uinta Basin Ecosystem Program at Dinosaur National Monument in northern Colorado. In "Expedition into the Parks," the Foundation is in a partnership with Canon U.S.A. to bring volunteers and park staffs together research, inventory and restore park resources.