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.

How can you contribute? Number 1, DONATE if you can. Our work supports many people who don’t have extra financial resources, and we are not asking you to spend outside of your means. If the work we do from our direct community outreach, education, and reforestation in southern California is important to you and you can’t contribute financially, PLEASE SHARE this with as many people as you can. If you have connections with community organizations who may want to contribute, please follow up with us to discuss options! If you want to contribute in other ways, we’ll have some things for sale on our website including shirts and hoodies, twig pots, cutting boards, coffee tables, and other cool wood items! You could also reach out about commissioning a custom wood piece! Just please give us until the end of January to fulfill all of our orders so that we can focus our efforts on raising the funds we need now. You can find more info, testimonials, and our inventory at www.Lumbercycle.org

In conclusion: If we can’t raise the money before January first, Tree San Diego will be forced to sell the machines to someone else and we can’t let that happen... We want to continue milling wood for our community and without grant funds available, it’s up to YOU and me, the community, to help keep this going. Once we can purchase these mills, they’ll be OURS, which will make our work more sustainable long term. So do what you can, and we’ll keep you up to date on our status and more stories of our community work.

THANK YOU!

Lumbercycle planted trees at Sweetwater High School with their students!

At Camp Winacka, Lumbercycle teaches campers about sustainable forestry and the kids get HANDS ON experience milling wood from the camp to be used by the camp!

We love working with active duty service members like these Marines who came out to mill some logs we collected from Camp Pendleton. Once the wood is done drying it'll go back to the base to continue serving the Marine Corps!

Or this group of Navy Chief selects that we worked with to help mill locally sourced trees into wood to make their Chief vessels! That was a really great experience for everyone involved.

We have school groups stop by every year to learn more about sustainability and include presentations from our partners like the Woodturner's Guild where Paul Simpson explains the Turn Around for Vets program to students from San Pasqual High School. We also donate wood to woodworking students from many different schools.

Or this student from Escondido High School who got hands on experience with the sawmill!

Or this group of engineering students from San Diego State University working on an invention to climb and trim palm trees!

Here's a photo of a yearly demonstration we do for the kids at the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians Earth Day!

We couldn't do this work without our sawmills.. So please consider donating!

Love,

Tom Hamilton

Lumbercycle Founder