At Tremont’s annual fundraiser Friday night, Great Smoky Mountains National Park Superintendent Charles Sellars finished his prepared remarks and then kept talking.
He worked in the park from 2008 to 2014. His wife taught elementary school. He got to chaperone his son’s overnight trip to Tremont, and more than a decade later the two of them still talk about it. Then the family moved before his daughter’s turn came around.
“I feel like she missed out on something,” he said, “because she didn’t get to go.”
A few minutes later, Tremont announced a gift built around exactly that problem.
Amy Buckner Chowdhry has committed $2 million toward construction of a learning center on Tremont’s second campus in Townsend, the largest single gift the project has ever received. She also pledged an additional $500,000 specifically to help Blount County students get to Tremont in the first place.
Tremont has been operating here since 1969, inside the most visited national park in the country, on the Blount County side of it. Today, exactly one Blount County school sends students to its three-night residential program. That number used to be considerably higher. Day trip participation fluctuates year to year, but local representation stays thin.
The reasons are practical. The residential program runs about $300 per student, and that is before a school adds a bus and a driver. Teachers are carrying more than they have ever carried, and overnight field trips are among the first things to fall off a stretched calendar. Tremont staff say there is no shortage of interest inside the local school systems, and that they have good partners in Blount County who want this to happen. What has been missing is the money to make it work.
That is what the $500,000 is for.
The arithmetic gets interesting fast. At roughly $300 a student, a half million dollars represents a lot of Blount County sixth graders standing in a creek and turning over rocks. Tremont is still finalizing how the fund will be structured and administered.
“I’m excited for what this gift means for Blount County students,” said Blount County Mayor-elect Jared Anderson, “and look forward to seeing how it expands their opportunity to appreciate our area’s natural beauty.”
Amy Buckner Chowdhry grew up in East Tennessee, went to Vanderbilt, spent three years teaching English in Hokkaido, Japan, and in 2004 founded AnswerLab, a San Francisco user experience research firm that became a go-to partner for Google, Amazon and American Express. She led it for two decades before moving into the board chair role in 2024.
Then she came home and started putting money into Blount County in a serious way. Her private foundation, Full Belly Farm, operates out of Walland, about fifteen minutes from the Tremont property, growing organic produce to address food insecurity in East Tennessee. She gave $100,000 to New Hope Blount County Children’s Advocacy Center for the “Be Their Voice” campaign, the one behind the billboards you have been driving past. She has supported the Blount County Education Fund.
Asked what drove her to get behind Tremont, she described a generation losing something the adults in the room took for granted.
“I think now more than ever, children are growing up in an environment where having access to nature will help them navigate the challenges of childhood today, and I think they’re getting increasingly disconnected from nature with the kinds of lives that we’re living”
-Amy Buckner Chowdhry
On why she chose Tremont in particular, she pointed to the second campus itself, a building designed to model how to live in the future, and to the organization’s history.
“I’m inspired by their new campus, and they’re building this incredible living building… that was important to me… And I really believe in the people.”
-Amy Buckner Chowdhry
Tremont bought 194 acres in Townsend in 2019 and then watched the plan get rearranged twice, first by the pandemic and then by shifts in federal funding. Rather than sit on the land, staff and volunteers spent those years learning it. They indexed species, treated hemlocks, restored streambanks and started growing food. A biological inventory turned up nearly 300 species of vascular plants and at least 34 bird species in the meadows alone. This year, timber was harvested on site for use in the building itself.
The first phase is deliberately narrow: one learning center with enclosed and open-air classroom space, restrooms, storage and a prep kitchen, plus the water, wastewater, energy and site access infrastructure that every future building will plug into. Dorms and a dining hall come in later phases.
The building is also chasing something no one in Tennessee has pulled off. Tremont registered the learning center with the International Living Future Institute in June and is pursuing full Living Building Challenge certification, one of the strictest sustainability standards in the world. If it certifies, it will be the state’s first.
Buckner Chowdhry’s gift joins earlier commitments of $250,000 or more from the Haslam Family Foundation, Clayton Homes, TVA, and Bill and Susan Varner. Much of that early money went toward design work, at a point when there was no building to walk through and no classroom to name.
“They were investing in something they couldn’t fully see,” Tremont President and CEO Catey McClary told the room.
Renderings of the new new learning center that will be first structure on Tremont’s second campus:
More than thirty years ago, McClary came to Tremont as a sixth grader on a school trip. She had no idea, she said, that three decades later she would be running the place and standing on a stage asking people to make that same experience possible for somebody else’s kid.
“We don’t know which kid is going to find a salamander under a rock and remember it for the rest of their life,” she said. “We don’t know which teacher will go back to their school and take their kids outside.”
She was not the only person in the room making that argument from experience. A longtime local educator and storyteller opened the evening by describing forty years of taking sixth graders to Tremont, and running into those same students years later at the grocery store, where they still bring it up without being asked. In the letters they send her, she said, one word shows up again and again: transformative.
Listen to enough Tremont stories and they all end up in the same place. A child gets access to the natural world in a real way, with time and space and someone paying attention, and it plants a seed. That seed grows into a deeper understanding of themselves, of the world, and of their place in it, and it keeps growing for the rest of their life. Superintendent Sellars is still talking to his son about a trip they took over a decade ago. McClary is running the organization that took her out into the woods in sixth grade. The students who wrote those letters are grown now and still using the same word… transformation.
The only real variable is whether a child gets to go.
The gift was announced Friday at Tremont’s annual fundraiser, where the room raised an additional $320,000 over the course of the evening. That money is separate from campus construction. It goes toward Tremont’s scholarship funds, its endowment, and resources for the educators who run the programs, which puts it on the same access question the $500,000 is aimed at. Board members, donors, park partners and elected officials filled the room, and a live auction closed out the night.
Tremont is still raising money for the learning center and is asking individuals, foundations and community partners to join the effort. Details on the second campus and how to give are at tremontfuture.org.
