The first time I saw Cali Brooks it was 1999 and she rose like a yellow-haired spirit out of the vegetable garden at the Blue Mountain Center, the former central Adirondack Great Camp turned writers’ retreat.
It was only my third or fourth day in the Adirondacks. I was utterly lost. Brushing her dirty hands on her blue jeans, Brooks put me at ease with a laugh (I asked, she has no memory of this meeting) and sent me in the right direction.
“It was like an endless summer,” Brooks told me recently, recalling her time working in Blue Mountain Lake. “It was magic. I swam across the lake every day.”
A quarter century later, the woman in the garden has emerged as one of the most influential behind-the-scenes power brokers and agenda-setters in the Adirondacks.
As president and CEO of the Adirondack Foundation, Brooks, now 53, wields quiet influence in Albany and in small towns across the park, while serving as a conduit between local needs and wealthy second homeowners who make up most of the region’s donor class. Last year alone, her organization distributed early $7 million in grants.
“It’s been such a slow evolution,” Brooks said of her growing role in the park, as we hiked one afternoon in Keene Valley. “We had two million dollars when I started. We’re now at around $100 million and we’ve given away close to $80 million in grants and scholarships. It’s been quite a ride.”
“Unequivocally a game changer”
It’s possible you haven’t heard of the Adirondack Foundation. But most of the park’s nonprofit organizations, relief funds, student scholarships and arts programs that you have heard of rely in part on the philanthropic pipeline Brooks helped create.
“They have real resources now,” said state senator Dan Stec, from Queensbury, whose district includes parts of the Adirondacks. “There are dozens and dozens of nonprofits [supported by the Foundation] where a $5,000 or a $10,000 grant goes a long way. Cali knows where the needs are.”
Many of the grants are relatively small, known as “acorn” funds, boosting food banks, for example, or underwriting journalism projects at North Country Public Radio (NCPR) or providing college scholarships to Adirondack students. There have also been major funds created—including relief efforts launched after Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 and again during the COVID-19 crisis.
“It’s absolutely, unequivocally been a game changer,” said Ellen Rocco, a community organizer in St. Lawrence County and former NCPR station manager. “When Cali took over, it was a fledgling foundation. She went to all the people she felt she needed to learn from. She was good at figuring out who knew their stuff and who cared about the Adirondacks.”
Brooks’s evolution into a major player in the Adirondack Park began with what she describes as a privileged childhood in Lake Placid. Her father, James Brooks, now 85, is still a prominent attorney in the village. Her mother, Marcia, who passed away in 2019, was a North Country native raised near Potsdam.
They sent their daughter to private boarding schools in Lake Placid that typically draw students from outside the Blue Line. “I think North Country School and Northwood School had a lot to do with who she is,” said James. “She met people from a lot of places. She wasn’t insulated.”
Brooks said his daughter found ways to connect deeply with their neighbors, local people who often struggled to make ends meet: “She was out in the neighborhoods. She saw much that I didn’t see.”
As a girl, Brooks rambled and climbed in the High Peaks. She describes herself as an avid skier and “proud 45er.” (“I have not hiked Allen; I’m a wuss,” she said, referring to the notoriously difficult summit in the Great Range.) She got her first taste of prominence at age nine, featured in a TV ad ahead of the 1980 Lake Placid Olympic Games that aired nationally.
“They were looking for a figure skater and they found me,” she laughed. “It was exciting and overwhelming and exhausting. I had to do the same thing over and over again.”
At college in Washington State, Brooks settled on a career doing international development work. That meant helping struggling communities in Central America and Southeast Asia build economies, social fabric and infrastructure.
Like so many young Adirondackers, she didn’t see a future for herself in the park. “I couldn’t wait to get out of here,” she said. “Kids who came back were failures. I felt that.”
“The place where I grew up needed help”
That all changed in 1996 when Brooks had a chance meeting with Harriet Barlow, an activist from the West Coast who had recently taken over leadership of the Blue Mountain Center.
Barlow assisted the Hochschild family in converting parts of industrialist Harold Hochschild’s sprawling estate— that was once a Great Camp—into a retreat center for progressive activists, artists and writers.
Barlow recalled how she and Brooks fell to talking about the Adirondack Park and its struggling communities. “We talked about the positive things that draw people and the negatives that make it so hard for people to live year-round,” Barlow said.
“Cali just got it. She can talk with such respect and instant affection to anyone. She was perfect.”
Barlow was an early advocate for the creation of a new philanthropic foundation to serve the Adirondacks. She said there was already a steady stream of funding for environmental organizations, but charitable contributions for human needs were relatively meager.
Using the Blue Mountain Center as a base of operations, Brooks began developing and building support for the concept. That meant talking to local leaders and gauging donor interest.
“The place where I grew up needed help,” Brooks said, recalling what she saw in those early years. “It was rural, it was poor, it was isolated.” Even her hometown Lake Placid, with its gilded Olympic legacy, struggled economically after the 1980 Winter Games. “It was so depressing, so many shuttered stores.”
Ben Strader, now head of the Blue Mountain Center (Barlow departed in 2017), worked with Brooks during those early years and later developed projects supported by the Foundation that included the revival of the Indian Lake Theater.
He said Brooks had a talent for bridging class and cultural divides between wealthy potential donors and people in communities who needed support.
“I was really shy but Cali was excited and eager to talk to people,” he said. “You have the sense that she’s thinking about you. You’ll find people all over the Adirondacks who know she’s there, ready to help.”
“They will take my phone calls”
In 2001, when she was just 31 years old, Brooks was made executive director of what was then a small philanthropic start-up called the Adirondack Community Trust (renamed the Adirondack Foundation in 2013).
She was relatively unknown in the park and her organization was little known outside the Tri-Lakes region. “At first we were just kind of a charitable bank, a pass-through operation,” Brooks said. “We helped people set up charitable funds that they directed.”
As a reporter in those years covering the Adirondacks for NCPR, I often came across organizations getting small pots of money from Brooks and her organization. (“Our ask was for $650 to purchase a new potter’s wheel,” one arts organizer told me in 2014.)
But as donations grew, Brooks gradually reshaped the organization, building an “unrestricted” fund that could be spent with more flexibility on bigger projects. She also grew her own influence, playing a more active role choosing which problems the Foundation would try to tackle.
In 2007, Brooks also helped found (and still co-leads) the Common Ground Alliance, an informal but influential network of community organizers, government leaders, environmentalists and philanthropists in the Adirondack Park who work to defuse political tensions and build consensus around projects.
“The players in the park were adversarial, to put it politely,” Senator Stec said. “Cali helped take the edge off. She has a way about her, making it easier for people to exhale and relax and have an honest conversation about issues.”
Along the way, Brooks settled permanently back in Lake Placid, marrying Galen Crane, a former Adirondack Life editor, and raising their daughter, Maisie.
When we talked about her approach—the fact that so much of her influence plays out behind the scenes—Brooks said she’s always felt more comfortable working away from the spotlight.
“I build relationships and trust, that’s my superpower,” she said. “I go to weddings and funerals. I go to the openings of day-care centers. I let people know I grew up here and I care. So now they will take my phone calls. They will show up to meetings.”
But in our conversations, Brooks also voiced frustration and sounded a note of urgency about the limitations of the Foundation’s work.
She said the economic struggles of the 1990s have given way to more complicated challenges, with growing income inequality in the Adirondack Park and soaring home prices and rental rates pricing many local people out of communities.
This region has seen solid growth in retirement-age residents, some living here full-time. But there has also been a rapid decline of younger, working-age families. Schools have shuttered in many towns. Grocery stores, restaurants, retail shops and churches have closed.
“It’s getting harder to come back and make a life here,” Brooks said. “Philanthropy can’t be all of the solution, but it’s part of the answer. We have to get people who’ve bought a second or a third home in the Adirondacks to give back to our community.”
Even some of Brooks’s supporters say it’s unclear whether the Adirondack Foundation can move the needle on problems this large and complex.
“I think they have had an impact, they’re changing some people’s lives,” said Linda Cohen, a long-time business leader and community organizer based in Old Forge.
Cohen noted, however, that the scale of economic and demographic challenges hitting the park are daunting, while the scale of grants remains relatively modest. “They’re not going to change the world.”
Brooks acknowledged that many of the Adirondack Park’s problems have outpaced solutions. She said a new goal of the Foundation is to focus more dollars on bigger, more impactful efforts.
“In the past we’ve been a mile wide and an inch thin. But one big win for us is the Birth to Three Alliance and our effort to make this a great place to raise children,” she said, pointing to a project created in 2015 that focuses donations on projects in Clinton, Essex and Franklin Counties that boost childcare, health services, nutrition and early education programs.
“We need to be focused on families. The biggest threat we face is population decline. We have a long way to go, but we’re making progress, we’re in the fight.”
The Foundation has also begun producing studies and reports designed to focus attention on key park problems, including early childhood development, but also education, employment and economic development needs.
“We have to be more than grant makers. We want to lift up the primary issues in the park. I would say we’re on the vanguard, helping the Adirondacks think about itself as a region. We’ve always been positive. Our narrative is hopeful.”
But to move the needle and continue expanding the Adirondack Foundation’s influence, Brooks said her biggest challenge is to keep growing the pipeline of donations.
In our conversations she described many of the wealthy people who summer in the park as close friends and allies. But she also sees them as a kind of natural resource (“It’s no longer minerals and lumber,” she told me), whose donations should play a role revitalizing struggling towns.
“They’re getting so much from our communities,” Brooks said. “We want them to give back. Together we’ve already grown a 100-million-dollar foundation and that is such a legacy. But there’s so much more to do and so much more to give. I feel like we’re just beginning.”
Visit www.adirondackfoundation.org or call (518) 523-9904 to learn more about the Adirondack Foundation’s funds, initiatives and scholarships; how to apply for grants; and ways to contribute to the Foundation’s work.
Brian Mann is a correspondent for National Public Radio who lives in Westport. He wrote “Billion-Dollar Bet,” about the Olympic Regional Development Authority, in the August 2023 issue.
