NEWC (Catalogue '98--est. 1983) is one of the premier wildlife hospitals in North America, with one of our region's highest-quality environmental education programs. Several years ago it became clear that demand for its programs was rapidly exceeding its physical capacity. This year its hospital will have treated around 3,000 sick, injured, or orphaned wild animals of 225 species; its school and camp education programs reach 5,000 children; it trains 50 undergraduate and veterinary students in wildlife medicine, from colleges and universities nationwide and abroad; and it answered 10,000 telephone and 2,000 front-door inquiries. The need for a new and larger facility stimulated a strategic program review and a creative envisioning process, asking what should be the ideal future of this leading institution, and of its field.

This project is the product of that planning process. NEWC is readying to break ground for a unique, field transforming facility: not just a state-of-the-art wildlife medicine teaching hospital, but a hospital and medical school that would also be open to the public for educational purposes, offering programs not just for regional schools, but also for internet-based distance learning by children and adults anywhere.

The new $8.6 million ($5.5 million is already raised) Thomas E. Curtis Wildlife Hospital and Education C enter will be located on a 12.4 acre site donated by the Curtis family, in Weymouth, MA. In addition to the hospital and offices, the Center will feature classrooms for elementary students and adults, a fully-equipped biology laboratory for high school, college, and adult science courses, and a television and internet studio which will enable direct and electronic observation of live surgeries and treatments in progress.

This will be a major step forward for this relatively small (13 staff, $1,049,790 budget) but leading institution, working at the problematic interface between wild nature and human society (over 80% of its patients are poisoned by lawn sprays, hit by cars, injured by plastic fishing lines, or even abused; all are returned to the wild after treatment). No one knows the answers to these problems, which are constantly worsening. What we can say with confidence, however, is that as answers are developed, they will in all probability be led by persons who are or have been associated with this new, and new kind of, institution. Here is your chance to join this adventure.