Central Connecticut River Valley Institute Inc

CCRVI was established in the Fall of 2004.  See our website at www.ccrvi.org.  This year we are promoting two progams:  Better than Dead Rescue and Nature Connection for Kids Grants .

Better Than Dead (BTD) is 12-year old, home-based, one-at-a-time dog rescue program run by Linda Rollins in Shelburne Falls, MA.  BTD has saved, rehabilitated, and re-homed 155 dogs who have been severely abused, horribly neglected and/or just plain unwanted and thrown away.

Nature Connection for Kids Grants  Direct connection with nature is essential for a child's healthy physical and emotional development.  It develops in children self-sufficiency, a quiet mind, common sense, aliveness, agility, inquisitive focus, awe, reverence and instills in them the ability and impulse to care for and tend their world and serve their community.  CCRVI provides grants to nature-connection programs to enable children who would not otherise be able  to participate.  

"Our daughter has embraced her present self and future maturing self with joy and a sense of empowering support.  This is done so well through deep play and nature connection that evolved naturally and powerfully and it will serve her all her days."

"Our son would come home every day with some new nugget of information about deer, or oak trees, or building a shelter in the woods, or squirrel sign that he learned . . . and yet it was never in a way that was forced or overly-structured. In this way all of the kids in the program simply absorbed what they heard and saw every day outside and therefore it was so much more real for them than if they had learned it in a classroom. Now, at 12, he treasures times when he can sit outside in the woods and just listen, inevitably he will see or hear something that he learned in the program."

CCRVI makes grants to the following programs working  with children in Western Massachusetts:

Wolf Tree (www.wolftreema.com),

Eathworks (http://earthworksprograms.com),

Full Moon Girls (www.vermontwildernessschool.org/full-moon-girls), and

Adventure In - Adventure Out (http://adventureinadventureout.com)