Clearwater Confronts Rough Weather

Venerable environmental organization at risk of insolvency 

The Hudson River Sloop Clearwater has had more than its share of setbacks in its colorful 55-year history.

Canceled concerts, economic downturns, mass resignations of board members, rotating executive directors, angry mobs cutting the sloop loose when it was docked overnight in Cold Spring and the deaths of beloved founders Pete and Toshi Seeger in 2014 and 2013, respectively. 

But the Beacon-based nonprofit now faces its biggest challenge. Last week, the organization announced that if it cannot raise $250,000 in the next two months, it will become insolvent. 

Executive Director David Toman said he wasn’t sure what would happen if the fundraising drive falls short since he’s never been involved with an organization so close to insolvency. But Clearwater’s income stream isn’t enough to cover its bills, and half the staff has been furloughed. 

The organization has always “operated culturally as a week-to-week, poor organization” reliant on small rather than large donations, said Toman. 

“We haven’t been able to change that yet,” he said. “The organization doesn’t have cash reserves, investments or an endowment that can bridge those periods when your cash-flow-to-bills ratio gets really bad.” 

Toman, the former chief financial officer for Mohonk Preserve, arrived in early 2022 after an extensive strategic planning process that identified the need for a new leader with a strong financial background. “I knew I was taking a big risk,” he said. “Clearwater was in a very bad state when I came on board.” 

Among other obstacles, the sloop hadn’t been able to run its sailing trips for Hudson Valley students since 2020 because of the pandemic, losing out on two years of income. 

It takes time to turn a big ship. While the organization made numerous structural changes to improve long-term financial health, including repairing its accounting processes and splitting its multi-day annual Riverfest concert into a separate nonprofit, the consequences from years of what Toman called “errors and bad managerial judgment” caught up with them. 

As of Wednesday (May 15), the group had raised $150,000 of the $250,000. Samantha Hicks, a former Clearwater captain who serves as president of the board of directors, said that while the swell of support is heartening, she knows it comes with a mandate from donors to “restructure in a way that prevents this from happening in the future.” 

Then again, making tough decisions is what Clearwater is all about.  

“He was a sailor, right?” said Hicks about Seeger. “He could have taken a number of different avenues to raise people’s awareness of the environment, but he was a sailor. And making sound decisions is the core of how sailors function and survive.” 

A river reborn

Pete Seeger’s story embodies not only everything that made the Clearwater such a powerful symbol of environmental justice, but the obstacles the organization would encounter for decades. A folk icon with millions of fans around the world, he had also been accused of being a Communist by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and found in contempt in 1955 for refusing to answer its questions. 

In 1966, with the battle underway to save Storm King Mountain from being turned into a power plant by Con Edison, Seeger approached the fledgling environmental organization Scenic Hudson with an offer to join them and put on a fundraising concert. 

While some were keen on the idea, the overriding fear was that Seeger’s far-left politics would alienate the conservative donors, corporations and foundations that the nascent organization was attracting to build its financial foundation. The group also worried that Seeger’s involvement would complicate its court case against ConEd. 

Seeger’s offer was declined, but he had another idea. His friend Vic Schwartz of Cold Spring had lent him a battered copy of the 1908 history book The Sloops of the Hudson. Seeger read the book in one evening at his home on the southern slopes of Mount Beacon and then stayed up until 3 a.m. banging out a seven-page letter to Schwartz that doubled as a manifesto. 

It proposed that they get together with a band of locals and build their own sloop. Schwartz spent the next few months passing Seeger’s letter up and down the cars of commuter trains until he amassed enough support to start building.

What purpose the yet-to-exist sloop would serve was still up for debate. Some envisioned it as a living maritime museum, complete with sailors in period costumes. But during an early discussion with a wealthy Hudson Valley resident who Seeger described as having the capacity to singlehandedly fund the construction, the organization’s mission snapped into focus. 

The prospective donor questioned the idea of building such a beautiful boat only to put it into the filthy Hudson River, and then mentioned that he did all of his own sailing in the Virgin Islands. 

“My fingers clenched in anger, but I didn’t say anything,” Seeger wrote in a June 1984 Clearwater newsletter. “He had just given us our best reason for building the boat. Cleaning up the river was a cause worth fighting for. We had allowed some people to make a profit from the Hudson, after which they went somewhere else to enjoy clear water.”

In May 1969, the Clearwater sloop launched from a shipyard in South Bristol, Maine, where it had been built. Thirty-five days later, with a full crew and a band of musicians — some of whom had never been on a boat before — the Clearwater pulled into New York City and received a hero’s welcome from the mayor and throngs of admirers. 

But not everyone was happy to see Seeger, who had been blacklisted from television for a decade after being grilled by Congress in 1955. When the sloop stopped in Cold Spring in 1970, locals cursed at Seeger, threw beer cans at him and threatened to set the ship on fire unless the crew left. 

In 1978, Cold Spring’s village trustees voted to bar the Clearwater from taking part in a music festival because of Seeger. It was around this time that the sloop had to dock in Cold Spring because of rudder problems. The crew woke in the middle of the night to find themselves adrift on the river. Someone had cut the moorings while they slept. 

Clearwater spent the 1970s introducing thousands of people, including students, to the Hudson River through educational sails and dockside concerts, all while fighting for a cleaner river. 

But while the sloop was on its way to becoming an icon, the organization’s leaders struggled with its direction and the possibility that they would be more capable of securing funding without the controversial Seeger. At least two executive directors quit during the 1970s, one after attempting to remove Seeger from the organization.

The Hudson River “is an issue that engenders a lot of passion in people,” said Hicks, the current board president. Seeger, she said, was a visionary who made people “think that we can do anything. But the question is, can we do all that stuff right now? Do we have the resources to do that? Not all of us can pull out a banjo, start playing and then the money comes pouring in.”

In 1976, after taking part in the parade of tall ships in New York Harbor to celebrate the nation’s bicentennial, Clearwater entered a new period of relative stability. Over the next two decades, people began to see the effects of Clearwater’s advocacy. And memories of Seeger as a Communist sympathizer faded as he continued to win over people with his music, optimism and endless charm. No longer a liability, Seeger became the group’s biggest asset. 

Clearwater thrived. Its annual Great Hudson River Revival concert raised money each year to keep the organization going, and a second sloop was leased to keep up with the demand for student trips. But Clearwater was soon caught up in global currents beyond its control.

Stormy seas

The roots of the current crisis began in 2007 with the global financial downturn, which led schools that booked annual trips with the sloop to cancel, never to return. Toshi Seeger, whose organizational acumen was one of Clearwater’s secret assets, died in 2013, and Pete died a year later. Suddenly the organization lacked someone who could raise thousands of dollars at the drop of a hat. 

Peter Gross, who was hired as executive director after the Seegers’ deaths, quit after 18 months. The organization put the festival on hold while it concentrated on a Coast Guard-mandated overhaul of the ship that cost over $500,000. The festival returned, along with the sloop, but years of rainy weekends led to reduced ticket sales and huge losses.

It was then, according to current executive director Toman, that Clearwater made its biggest mistake. After its annual, voluntary third-party audit revealed that the nonprofit was in danger of collapsing, the organization stopped its annual audits in order to concentrate on fundraising. 

“Without that information, it’s hard to assess and judge where you are as well as provide the information you need to other people,” he said.

Then the pandemic struck in 2020, ending the festival, public sails and the group’s income. Losing the programs was “gut-wrenching,” said Hicks, who had returned to Clearwater and joined the board just weeks before the pandemic shutdown. 

After Toman was hired, a donor made a large gift for the sole purpose of getting Clearwater’s accounting back on track. Several years worth of audits were completed in 14 months. But the damage was done. Clearwater temporarily lost its nonprofit status and its accessibility to government grants. 

“We didn’t open up to that market again until late last year,” said Toman. “So it’s going to take us a good year to build back into that type of funding stream that can help support our programs.”

The irony of the current funding gap is that it comes at a time when Clearwater managed to finally steer itself back toward calmer seas. A few members spun off the festival into a separate nonprofit that hopes to return next year as RiverFest for Pete’s Sake. If it does, it will be another opportunity to showcase the sloop. But if the concert fails again, Clearwater won’t be on the hook for the loss.

A version of the apprentice program that brought Hicks on board in the 1990s is back, with training programs aimed specifically at young women, young men, and its new “Queerwater” programming aimed at LGBTQIA+ youth. In addition, schools are booking trips again, although Hicks notes that the statewide post-pandemic shortage of school bus drivers has proven to be an obstacle.  

Toman said that about 15,000 people now sail on the sloop each year. They’re looking to increase that number with new “pay-what-you-can” sails to get people out on the river who could not otherwise afford it. The group is reaching out to local businesses to sponsor the sails, whose first series took place last weekend at the Kingston Earth Fair. 

Jen Benson, a former Riverkeeper employee who last year became Clearwater’s director of environmental action, said the organization has “good forward momentum” but is at a difficult point. 

There was some trepidation within the organization about addressing the predicament so publicly, but to do otherwise would be against the spirit of a group with a reputation for being honest, she said. 

“The Hudson Valley is a great community for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that people here come together in times of challenge,” said Benson. “And that’s what we’re starting to see.”