Raise the Trunk
For the Santee Delta Project Fundraising Campaign
Help the Santee Delta Project Team to raise the trunk gates to sustain the flow
of resources needed to sustain this 5 year project.
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The ‘Raise the Trunk’ Campaign is made up of Solidarity Groups and individuals who will provide $200,000 to support the first two years of field work, background research, and historical documentation work.
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Solidarity Groups are teams of individuals, who stand in unity to support a portion of the Santee Delta Project, as a group, with shared interests and contributions to the project's success.
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Consider joining one of our Santee Delta Project Solidarity Groups, based on your interest in History, Climate Change, Land Protection and Data Collection.
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Solidarity Group Member Benefits
Solidarity Group members receive special invitations to participate in one-of-a-kind project experiences in 2025 and 2026, like a private Archeological Tour with Dr. Kendy Altizer and the Santee Delta Project Field Team, where you can 'put a shovel in the ground' and help to gather artifacts and soil samples.
Members will also receive a signed copy of a significant piece of literature that highlights the Santee Delta As a special thank you to the members of the Sprout and Tidal Groups, the Santee Delta Project Team has arranged an exclusive tour Guided by Dr. Kendy Altizer and Dr. Richard D. Porcher, Jr., and lunch at the historic Peachtree Plantation located on South Santee River in St. James Santee Parish. Peachtree Plantation, now a ruin, was once a high style three-story dwelling owned by the Lynch family, prominent rice planters and politicians in colonial South Carolina.
Choose where you wish to show your solidarity for the Santee Delta Project. All financial pledges between $500 and $25,000 will be used to cover the first phase project and operational costs. You are invited to choose the best donation plan that suits your family's philanthropic plans.
The Sprout Flow Group
The first flood after planting of rice was called
the Sprout Flow.
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This group represents our inaugural donors and supporters, who invested the first seeds of financial and in-kind support needed to organize and launch the Santee Delta Project.
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Your family name is etched into history as a member of this group, reflecting support provided to fund the project operations, organization administrative costs, and essential field team stipends, to launch the five-year cultural survey of the Santee Delta.
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*Includes individuals and small businesses that pledge $25,000 or more
The Tidal Group
This group stands together, in honor of the people who brought the method of rice production from Africa to the New World.
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This group will support budgeted items such as essential archaeological field supplies, including the field team boat and tidal gauges, needed to
conduct a comprehensive aerial and ground-based study of the surviving historic built environment where enslaved settlements and support infrastructure for rice production were located.
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*Includes individuals and small businesses that pledge $5,000 or more
The Land Protectors
This group stands together in honor of the Santee
Delta soil and marsh lands that were converted into thousands of acres of productive rice fields.
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This group will support budgeted items such as technology data collection tools (hardware and software) needed to create a detailed 3D
reconstruction of the environment, as it would have looked at the height of rice production, circa 1850.
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*Includes individuals and small businesses that pledge $2,500 or more
The Climate Champions Group
This group stands together to support the SDP team of researchers and scholars, as they collect as much data as possible, to preserve some aspects of the Santee River historical landscape and to avert the loss of resources, both cultural and natural due to rising sea levels.
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This group will support budgeted items such as essential climate change modeling tools and weather stations needed to produce a predictability model, to determine what may be lost first to climate change. With this modeling, the field team will be able to strategically target the most vulnerable areas that will be impacted by rising sea levels. Those areas will be documented first.
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*Includes individuals and small businesses that pledge $1,000 or more
The History Explorers
This group stands together in support of the Santee Delta Team, as they search for Santee Delta descendants of settlers and enslaved workers- to seek input and to collect oral histories.
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This group will support budgeted items such as the search and collection of descendant voices. This includes community engagement and live interviews with living descendants to gather oral histories which will be used to tell a more complete story of the Santee Delta.
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*Includes individuals and small businesses that pledge $500 or more
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Unloading Rice Barges, South Carolina, 1870s. Sketch. Adapted from Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed May 29, 2022, http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1164
Raise the Trunk
For future generations to learn about Rice Culture
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Make a pledge to support this legacy building work, over two years, in a way that feels right for you and your family.
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Become a member of one of the Santee Delta Project Solidarity Groups today, before climate change limits our access to the historic sites nestled along the Santee river.
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Donating $50 a week ensures that the project team will have the necessary equipment, such as water vessels, software, and mosquito nets to record the material culture and stories still present among the narrow waterways and bluffs along the Santee river.
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