When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated Great Smoky Mountains National Park in September 1940, all of America was contemplating what the metastasizing international conflict we now know as World War II might mean for the future. In his speech at Newfound Gap, Roosevelt urged all Americans to do their part to preserve the nation and, by extension, the national park.
“To conserve our liberties will not be easy,” he said. “The ask will require the united efforts of us all.”
Those words have since proven prophetic in a way Roosevelt could not have foreseen. The park’s average visitation has increased 20-fold since then — but federal funding has not grown accordingly. In 2024, for example, congressional appropriations worked out to less than $2 per visit recorded that year, while the park carried $259 million worth of deferred maintenance projects.
To help meet the need, a variety of organizations work alongside the park to help it achieve its mission, but four dedicated nonprofits serve as the Smokies’ official nonprofit partners. Each came into existence at different times for different reasons, starting with Smokies Life in 1953, Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont in 1969, Friends of the Smokies in 1993 and Discover Life in America in 1998.
“Partners play a vital role in our work at Great Smoky Mountains National Park,” said Superintendent Charles Sellars. “Their support strengthens the visitor experience, advances science and learning, and helps us protect these mountains so they can be enjoyed for generations to come.”
Smokies Life
Founded in 1953, Smokies Life is the oldest of the four partners and the only one created in response to a federal law. Originally called the Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association, Smokies Life was formed as the park’s official cooperating partner.
“Cooperating associations exist to fulfill some specific functions, the primary of which is to provide quality educational and retail services inside National Park Service units,” said Smokies Life CEO Jacqueline Harp.
The organization’s scope started small, focused on distributing maps and a limited number of publications, but its impact has since multiplied. Rebranding as Smokies Life in 2024, it currently has 29,000 members, operates eight retail stores and a web store, and has given $55 million in cash aid to the park since its creation. As a boutique publisher, Smokies Life has 68 titles currently in print, produces a twice-yearly magazine, a weekly newspaper column, original video content and a podcast. It even has a Grammy nomination to its name.
Still, its core functions remain the same, Harp said: providing quality educational publications and services, using the proceeds to offer cash aid to the park and building a membership program consisting of some of the park’s strongest supporters.
“We really think of that community of people as being one of the most engaged constituencies of advocates for the Smokies,” she said.
Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont
In 1969, the Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont became the park’s second official nonprofit partner, offering immersive, overnight educational experiences on its campus inside the national park.
“When we describe the Tremont experience, it’s about cultivating and sparking that curiosity and that sense of discovery,” said Tremont CEO Catey McClary.
Like Smokies Life, Tremont has widened its scope over the decades while remaining focused on its core mission. Though it initially worked exclusively with school-age children, today its programming is more diverse. Tremont is growing its engagement with teachers and educators, and adult field programs such as the Southern Appalachian Naturalist Certification Program, the Tremont Writers Conference and residential photography workshops bring the Tremont experience to people of all ages. In 2019, it purchased 194 acres in Townsend, Tennessee, for eventual development as a second campus, which would allow Tremont to reach even more people.
School trips are still central to Tremont’s work. In 2025, the organization hosted 3,667 students and teachers, including 1,548 children who experienced their first full-day hike in a national park.
“We have statistics that say people are spending less and less time outdoors — as little as seven minutes every day,” McClary said. “We’re trying to figure out how to meet people where they are.”
Friends of the Smokies
Friends of the Smokies, the park’s philanthropic partner, was founded following a 1993 hike to the Mount Cammerer Fire Tower. Dismayed to find the tower in disarray, the hikers — all Smokies devotees who had grown up in the region — arranged a meeting with then-Superintendent Randy Pope. Pope had already been researching the possibility of creating a philanthropic organization to support the Smokies, and soon thereafter, Friends of the Smokies was born.
“The partnership started hand-in-hand with the community and the National Park Service together recognizing that there just simply wasn’t going to be enough in the federal budget,” said Friends of the Smokies President and CEO Dana Soehn.
Since its founding, Friends of the Smokies has raised more than $108 million to support the park. That money comes from multiple sources, the largest of which is the specialty license plate program that generates more than $2 million each year from sales in North Carolina and Tennessee. Special events, individual donations and estate gifts also contribute to the mission. Friends supports projects spanning every division within the park and has established two endowments — Trails Forever and Forever Places — to permanently fund crews dedicated to rehabilitating high-use trails and preserving historic structures.
“There is work happening in our national park that just simply could not take place without philanthropic support from our donors and communities,” Soehn said.
Discover Life in America
Though it is the park’s youngest park partner, Discover Life in America is dedicated to studying its oldest residents. Since its creation in 1998, DLiA has recorded more than 1,000 new-to-science species through its signature project, the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory, as well as more than 11,000 species never before documented inside the park.
“We need to know as much about the things that are protected as we can find out,” said Executive Director Todd Witcher. “If we can’t figure out everything we have in a space, then we can’t do a good job of protecting it.”
DLiA works with scientists from all over the world who specialize in distinguishing between similar-looking specimens in understudied or difficult-to-observe species groups like lichen, wasps and fungi. It also enlists the general public in its mission via the iNaturalist app, through which users can upload photos of observations they’ve made in the park. So far, 422 new-to-park species records have come through the app.
“One of the challenges of doing an inventory like this in a place as big and broad and wide and beautiful as the park is it’s hard for any single scientist to do what we would call a good job of covering the park in a sensible way,” Witcher said. “So having a large group of tourists doing it is an amazing outgrowth of what we do.”
Filling the gap
Whether planning projects, distributing funding or communicating with the public, the partners work closely with the National Park Service to ensure their resources support the agency’s mission as effectively as possible. They also work closely with each other — in myriad, overlapping ways.
“It’s like a family,” said Witcher.
Friends of the Smokies funds grants that bring scientists to the Smokies for DLiA research. DLiA partners with Tremont to carry out community science projects. Tremont and Smokies Life co-organize the annual Tremont Writers Conference. Smokies Life helps Friends of the Smokies produce the annual report it distributes to its members. The list goes on.
“It takes each of us in our own special ways to help take care of the Smokies,” Soehn said.
Over the years, the park’s needs have only grown. For example, Soehn said, when she came to the Smokies as an NPS employee three decades ago, the park had a dedicated crew of six historic structure specialists working to preserve its historic buildings. By the time Friends of the Smokies launched its Forever Places program in 2020, only one remained.
“We know that the national park has had a lot of challenges throughout the years, but also recently,” McClary said.
Funding and staffing challenges during the past couple of years have sharpened the need, with park partners called upon to help in new ways. However, insufficient funding is not a new issue for the national parks.
“Our public lands are not adequately funded through congressional appropriations,” Harp said. “They weren’t before, and they still aren’t.” The current landscape has “highlighted the importance of partnerships, more so than ever.”
To learn more about the four park partners, visit nps.gov/grsm/getinvolved/partners.htm.
(Holly Kays is the lead writer for the 29,000-member Smokies Life, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the scientific, historical and interpretive activities of Great Smoky Mountains National Park by providing educational products and services such as this column. Learn more at smokieslife.org or reach the author at hollyk@smokieslife.org.)