About Dave Wheelan

“What is the difference between your organization and the Mid-Shore Community Foundation?”

It is quite likely Linda Kohler has been asked that question over one million times since she started working at Chesapeake Charities in 2005.

Throughout her day as its executive director, she graciously points out the Charities early mission of working with individuals or small groups, mostly with no resources at all, to create organizations that serve the public good.  And now, with close to one hundred nonprofits under the Chesapeake Charities umbrella, this story is compelling.

Yet, it is the other work of Chesapeake Charities that is equally impressive. Linda and her staff collaboratively work with those same organizations and others on mission delivery and funding.

A case in point has been Chesapeake Charities’ work with the United Way of Kent County. It took on a partner role with the United Way’s goal to identify the most serious challenges facing Kent County, and they successfully found funding for a professional assessment of needs. The results were four areas of major concern, including public transportation, generational poverty, senior care, and the implementation of Dial 211 public services hotline.

The Spy thought it would be interesting to drill down to the issue of public transportation as an example of this works.  Now that the United Way could confirm that getting to work, to health care, to school, or a community center was a problem,  the next step was to find transportation professionals to identify economically realistic solutions. And once again, Chesapeake Charities was there to help find the funds to do that critical first step.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about Chesapeake Charities please go here.

Every year in February, the United States goes out of its way to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. And every year, Washington College uses this opportunity to remind the country that the first real monument to America’s founding father was the establishment of a liberal arts college in Chestertown in 1782.

It is a story worth telling. With Washington’s specific approval, accompanied by a significant donation, William Smith, the college’s first president, set out to create an entirely new curriculum dedicated to training its students to prepare for leadership and citizenship in a very new country. So new, in fact, that it had only completed its formal separation from Britain just months before Washington College opened its doors.

But what gets lost all to0 often in the narrative of the founding of Washington College is the fact that its genesis was much more the result of some of the country’s best and brightest living in Maryland making an extraordinary investment in what they considered to be an essential resource for the Eastern Shore.

With landowner names like Goldsborough, Lloyd, Paca, and Tilghman, many of whom served as Maryland governors, representatives to the Continental Congress, or signers of the Declaration of Independence, these families generously donated for the new college’s founding despite the considerable distance Chestertown was by land or water from their homes.

That is one of the many rich takeaways from the Spy’s recent conversation with historian and author Adam Goodheart, Washington College’s long-serving director of the Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. In addition, Adam talks about the remarkable backgrounds of these Talbot and Queen Anne’s sponsors (who donated almost two-thirds of the funds needed to launch the college), their vision for the Shore, as well as frank discussion on their slaveholder past.

This video is approximately eight minutes in length. For more information on Washington College Starr Center please go here

Chesapeake Harvest, which has been incubated by the Easton Economic Development Corporation for the last several years, started out focused on preparing Eastern Shore farmers to expand their market reach by training them with best practices and food safety guidelines required for larger markets.

But from the very beginning, Chesapeake Harvest was also eager to help those farmers with marketing and sales strategies to satisfy not only wholesale demands, but develop creative new ways to open up retail and institutional opportunities.

One of those new opportunities has been the development of Chesapeake’s online farmers’ market. With the leadership of advisory board member Jordan Lloyd, his wife, Alice, Chesapeake Harvest’s Elizabeth Beggins, and EEDC director Tracy Ward, the team switched on their website a year ago to test the waters of this entirely new way to bring local food to local family tables.

Last week, the Spy sat down with Jordan at the Bullitt House in Easton to talk about this new program and its future.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. For more information about Chesapeake Harvest and to access their website please go here.