Lumbercycle

Hey Lumbercyclers! I’m Tom Hamilton, founder of Lumbercycle.. This is a CALL TO ACTION! We are at risk of losing our sawmills and we really need your help. Now if you know me, you know I really try not to ask for too much help very often.. I want to be the helpful one! But right now I urgently need to raise $50,000 before January first or we’ll be at risk of losing our Woodmizer LT50 and Lucas model 7 that we use for all of our community outreach and education. Your donations are 100% tax deductible, and if you can’t donate, please share with as many people as you can!

Now, When I started Lumbercycle back in 2016 with my partner Brett, my vision was to build connections between wood and urban forestry in a way that could impact low income and disadvantaged communities while improving sustainability. Since then we’ve come SO far, making a positive impact in communities all over San Diego County and beyond. We’ve gone from simply trying to keep logs out of the landfill and providing lumber for communities who experience poverty, to actively working in reforestation projects and workforce development! We’ve done milling demos for girl scout camps, earth days, and tribal groups, donated thousands of board feet of lumber for community gardens, and coming in the next year we’ll be training tribal crews to use their own mills and develop wood products programs to help their community! We've also worked with veterans, religious groups, migrants and refugees.. We partner with the San Diego Fine Woodworkers Association and the San Diego Woodturners Guild. We've given wood to the San Diego Natural History Museum and the Birch Aquarium and the San Diego Botanic Garden and the La Jolla Historic Society. And that’s seriously just a tiny slice of the outreach that we do on a regular basis. We are a nonprofit organization that does REAL WORK that you and the community can depend on. We have a boots on the ground approach to outreach and sharing any knowledge we can find rather than gatekeep information. We want to grow with the community!

What will we do with the money we raise? We need to raise $30,600 to buy out our machines from Tree San Diego, who was our fiscal sponsor on the CALFIRE grant when the machines were originally purchased. Tree San Diego does a lot in our community to plant trees and improve our urban forest, so that means that your donation will support TWO local organizations by helping us keep milling for the community while also helping Tree San Diego plant more trees! For any donations after that, we plan to update our Lucas Mill to a larger model so that we can process logs into larger dimensional wood more efficiently and free up our Model 7 to do more direct work with our tribal community partners on reservations! After that any remaining funds will go towards helping us donate more wood to community projects and people in need all around San Diego County.