Items of Special Note:
Click Plymouth Discounts section below
Come Vote in favor of BBC May 21 at 7pm
An affordable camp experience.
Bethany Birches was founded in the 1960s to help young people grow, learn, and develop. It was important from the beginning, that camp be accessible. As stated as a subsection of our mission and vision, our priorities include:
- To serve young people, with or without church or religious experience, living in Vermont and surrounding areas.
- To insure a physically and emotionally safe environment for everyone under our care.
- To maintain a low and affordable fee structure for the Bethany Birches Camping Experience.
Community Support For Kids
For years, the town of Plymouth has helped keep camp affordable by creating a local agreement rate that allows some of the property tax to be paid, and some redistributed. This helps subsidize camper fees. In many states, non profits do not pay property tax. Vermont is a little different, and requires many non profits to pay many forms of tax. Vermont also allows individual towns to support their community organizations through local agreement rates. Plymouth does this for the school building and Bethany Birches. Bridgewater utilizes the same. Woodstock too. Many towns utilize the local agreement rate to help sustain their community organizations.
We are grateful to all of the lovely folks that support Bethany Birches, including the voters of Plymouth. To show appreciation as long as we are afforded the local agreement rate, we want you to save money when sending a child to camp in two ways:
- Utilizing our normal, sliding scale
- Using the Plymouth locals discount
- If you are a resident, take 50% additional off by using code: PlymouthRes
- If you are a property owner and not a resident, take 20% additional off by using code: PlymouthFriend
(Simply type this in when registering your child. We invite you to use this for any child of yours. That could be a grand child, biological child, foster child currently with you.)
Voting in favor of BBC (again) means no change for you.
That’s right, no change. The petition desires to undo an agreement. If the agreement is undone, you will save $8 per $100,000 of your property tax assessment. So if you own a property assessed at $200,000 you will save $16. If the agreement is undone, Bethany Birches will pay an additional $19,000 which we did not budget for. That will put ~40 low income families at risk of not being able to attend this year, some who are Plymouth children.
Many Hands
It is said that it takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village to support a non profit. The town of Plymouth is not the only supporting entity. Each year:
- More than 100 people give more than 3000 volunteer hours.
- More than 300 people give more than $250,000.
- We often budget near break even. In 2024, we budgeted a $650 surplus. If the local agreement rate is reversed, we will be at a deficit of ~$19,000. That will jeopardize 40 low income summer campers each year, hiring a full staff, and create other challenges.
