Profile: Allison Butcher

By Dawne Belloise

Allison Butcher moved to the mountains of Colorado in 2005 to work as the Adaptive Sports Center’s development director and in her role was instrumental in leading a successful $14 million campaign for the new Kelsey Wright Building. Her passion for making a difference and fundraising has been a driver throughout her life.

She was born and raised in Champaign, Illinois, and Allison and her friends jokingly called the place, “The pain.” It was a Midwest community and a great place to grow up, but she says that there wasn’t a lot to do. So, like most Midwest rural kids, they were into athletics and also made their own mischievous entertainment. “We got into a bit of trouble, too,” she smiles. Looking for some excitement throughout high school, Allison recalls, “It was a regular weekend occurrence to toilet paper and egg people’s homes, and it wasn’t just for Halloween. There was this place where everyone would go to make out. We’d drive around and throw eggs at the cars they were making out in,” she laughs. “You can’t get away with that anymore,” and she’s glad for that because with the typical drinking and smoking of teenagers of that Midwestern era, she feels, “I’m grateful that’s not cool anymore because I have two kids and I wouldn’t want them to go down that path.”

Allison Butcher comes from a blended family, siblings who were raised as full siblings rather than half. Recently, she lost both a sister and a brother, and experiencing all that has changed her outlook on what’s important in life. “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” she says, “because it’s not worth it.”

Working since she was 14, Allison had a Midwestern work ethic and she wound up with an impressive amount of experience in humanistic jobs. “I’ve always had a job,” she says, and her resume includes work as a lifeguard, camp counselor to three and four-year-olds and as an aide at a children’s home for kids and adults with severe and profound physical and mental disabilities, which she enjoyed more than the camp counseling. While working days at a nursing home she also worked as a facer at a grocery store.

Allison graduated from high school in 1994. She didn’t have a clue as to what she wanted to do next, but she enrolled at Indiana University in Bloomington. It was just far enough away from her parents but close enough to come home whenever she wanted. She majored in journalism with a concentration in photography and a minor in environmental studies. Originally, she had a dream to write for National Geographic but in her junior year something shifted. It was right around the time Princess Diana died and journalists had started to feel like a nuisance, she recalls. “It was getting to a point that being a journalist was against my values and morals and journalism started to feel like a fight and I didn’t want to fight.” Still, she stuck it out and graduated in 1998.

Her best buddy was a girl from Germany who moved to Champaign when they were both in third grade. After college, they decided to travel Europe together. They left in the winter of 1999. Her friend’s grandparents still had a home in Germany, which became their home base to travel from for four months, backpacking and living off bread and whatever they could scrounge up. She returned to discover her mom’s cancer had returned and Allison stayed to help care for her.

Allison joined AmeriCorps, a government agency service program for young adults. Her program was Comprehensive Homeless Awareness Response Team, or CHART. “It didn’t pay very much, but they would pay some of your student loans,” she explains. For Americorp, Allison worked for a behavioral health center, helping women and children who were homeless or in danger of becoming homeless to find resources. “I would take them to the Social Security office to sign up for disability benefits, help with food assistance, and try to get them all the resources that they needed. I had 10 to 15 women at a time, checking in with them and their children to help in any way I could.” She did that for two years while also waiting tables at a billiards place, where she made most of her money.

After that, inspired by her mom who was an early childhood educator and feminist, a fighter for human rights who Allison tells loved and cared for everyone and animals — she worked at a men’s homeless shelter as the community relations coordinator, organizing volunteers and raising money. Allison worked there for over two years while taking care of her mom. In 2001, her mom passed away. Allison had moved in with a girlfriend who also had cancer and who also passed away around the time of her mother’s death. She was trying to cope with the illnesses and passing of people she loved. “Death has defined me. It’s really hard. My mom and I were really close.”

In 2002, she became the community relations manager for the YMCA in Champaign. She bought a house at 26 years of age and lived there with her sister. But she could feel herself unraveling. During those years, Allison herself wasn’t in a healthy place. Grief hollowed her out but even though it took a while to get through that deeply dark place, it eventually inspired her to take a leap to leave.

Like her mom, who also didn’t want to live in the Midwest, Allison wanted to leave. “I was not treating myself well and I was thinking I needed to get out of the Midwest, smoking cigarettes and going to the bar all the time.” She started searching nonprofit jobs across the country, sticking to fundraising because that’s what she was good at and she loved giving back and, “having a job that’s more than money.” When she saw that Adaptive Sports was hiring a development director she applied for the position, having never heard of Crested Butte.

Allison recalls that the interview process was intense with six phone interviews, a personality test, then a final interview in February of 2005. She flew into Denver, was picked up by an intern and had a harrowing drive to CB, where it was a huge snow year. Driving into CB for the first time, there was more snow than she had ever seen in her entire life.  “The Adaptive staff was young, energetic, optimistic and full of zest for life,” she says. “I knew I was looking for a place I could spend more time outdoors.” Growing up, she’d spent so much time with her family fishing and on the lake at their family cabin. The Adaptive employees took her downhill skiing and Nordic skiing. “At the end of it, I called home and said, I’m moving to a snow globe. It was so magical.” She returned to Illinois, put her house on the market, packed up the dog and moved to Crested Butte in April.

“No one warned me about off-season when nothing was open,” she recalls and panicked a little about moving here. Allsion forced herself to go out into town and do things like going to dinner and the bar solo and introducing herself. Two weeks after arriving, she met her future husband, Mike Butcher at The Last Steep. “He was grouchy and didn’t want to talk,” but she offered to buy him a beer at the Eldo. Six months later, they were a thing. They married in 2009. Their daughter Lottie arrived in 2013 and their son George in 2016.

She worked for Adaptive for three years, loving her job and life, camping, fishing, hiking, rafting and always outdoors with her husband and friends. In 2009, the Rocky Mountain Biological Labs (RMBL) approached her about becoming its development director. She accepted and was there for six years, helping to build the structure of the development program and launched a $14 million capital campaign to build the new science center, community center, renovate the visitors center and restore historic cabins. “It was definitely a challenge for me. I went from fundraising for Adaptive Sports, a heart-centered mission that appeals to everyone, to thinking about how to raise money from a place of academics and science and the planet’s future. It was kind of thinking verses the human side of fundraising. Obviously RMBL’s mission impacts humans but it’s not obvious because it’s a longer-term impact. It was harder but we were very successful.”

Still, she always knew she wanted to return to Adaptive because that mission spoke to her heart. In 2015, after finishing the RMBL capital campaign, Adaptive hired her back. Since returning, she’s led a successful $14 million campaign for the new Kelsey Wright Building. “When I started in 2005, the office was inside the bus stop on the mountain with three desks and that’s where I worked.” Allison watched the organization grow from basically a closet with a minimal budget and staff to what it is today. They now own three buildings, a fleet of seven vehicles and three trailers. The budget has grown from about $800,000 to $4.5 million, and they serve roughly 1,000 participants. “The Kelsey Wright Building is state of-the art and something people with disabilities and the entire community can be proud of,” she says. “I truly feel very called and blessed and fortunate to be able to do what I do every day. To have a job where I can make a living here, and also make a difference, is rare in this valley, I think. I’m in it for the long haul.”

Allsion also wanted her kids to be raised around diversity and people with disabilities, and she feels that Adaptive brings that diversity to the valley with different races, genders, and abilities, more than anything else. “My kids volunteer with Adaptive. They help with mailings during the CB Open. They fundraise for Bridges of the Butte, which is raising more money than ever before.” Her kids are also avid hockey players, so she and her husband travel all over the state.

“They’re growing up in paradise, in a community where people take care of each other and watch out for each other,” she concludes. “We’re so lucky to live here, it’s so refreshing in the world we’re living in right now.”