Friends of Acadia

Additionally, Friends of Acadia contributes to a variety of community outreach events such as the Earth Day Roadside Clean-up and Soil to the Summits hikes. In partnership with Acadia National Park, Friends implements and contributes to other programs including the Summit Stewards, the Wild Garden of Acadia, the Recreation Technicians, the Acadia Winter Trails Association, the Island Explorer, invasive plant eradication, the peregrine falcon and hawk watch program, Acadia Teacher Fellows Program, water quality monitoring, rehabilitation of historic buildings, and a volunteer program that typically contributes over 5,000 hours of time per year to help maintain Acadia's trails and carriage roads. FOA continues to help ANP address the ongoing seasonal employee housing shortage. In 2025, construction continued at Harden Farm, an ANP project that FOA contributed an additional $4.5 million to help complete, adding to the $7M contributed during 2024. Phase One, 28 new one bedroom and studio apartments, was completed, and Phase Two, another 28 one bedroom and studio apartments, was initiated. Solar panels were installed at FOA's seasonal housing complex in Trenton, Maine with a potential energy savings of nearly $600,000 over 25 years. FOA also secured funding to install solar panels at Harden Farm with a potential energy savings of $300,000 during its lifetime. 2025 welcomed inaugural residents at the newly completed Dane Farm complex in Seal Harbor, Maine, housing eight seasonal employees for ANP.

IRS Form 990 Part III, fiscal year 2025, signed under penalty of perjury.

Friends of Acadia makes grants from its Acadia Trails Forever project fund to the ANP trails program to maintain the park's 153 miles of trails. In 2025, the Trail crew undertook significant repairs to the Hunters Beach Trail and the North and South Bubble Trails. They also completed the rehabilitation of the Bubbles Divide Trail and worked with volunteers to install 500 feet of raised cedar boardwalk along the Hemlock Path, restoring natural water flow through the Great Meadow. They built two stone staircases and improved drainage along the Valley Peak Trail and completed additional sections of the Great Meadow Loop.

IRS Form 990 Part III, fiscal year 2025, signed under penalty of perjury.

The Carriage Road maintenance grants help to make possible the salaries of several Acadia National Park workers and interns who perform regular maintenance of the park's 44 miles of historic carriage roads. In 2025, the carriage road crew repaired washouts, graded 5 miles of carriage roads, and spread 150 tons of surface materials. They cleaned four miles of road ditches and, flushed culverts. They surveyed 138 of the documented vistas on the carriage roads and worked to clear 43 of those, including supervising volunteers who worked on 12 vistas.

IRS Form 990 Part III, fiscal year 2025, signed under penalty of perjury.