This nonprofit is featured in the WALTER Guide to Giving 2026, a curated guide to Raleigh and Wake County organizations that depend on holiday-season support.
On a fall Saturday at Dorothea Dix Park, kids race across Gipson Play Plaza after searching the pines for a family of giant wooden trolls. Friends settle onto the deck at Flowers Cottage with a coffee or a glass of wine. And, on the side of an unassuming building, a poem-turned-mural by Jaki Shelton Green waits for anyone who stops to read it.
Ten years ago, none of that was possible.
Dix Park Conservancy was founded in 2016 to raise private support for Dix Park as the project’s nonprofit partner to the City of Raleigh. Together, they’re transforming the former Dorothea Dix Hospital campus into a park where everyone feels welcome and where the people who love it help build what comes next.
Since then, the Conservancy has raised more than $75 million to support that vision. Donors make the hundreds of free programs the city plans each season possible, so a skate night at the chapel or a mahjong class costs nothing to participate in. The Conservancy has led and funded most of the public art at Dix Park, from Thomas Dambo’s Trolls to Thomas Sayre’s iconic Sunflower Power Poles on Lake Wheeler Road. That same support restored the historic Stone Houses and reopened Flowers Cottage this summer as Cottage Coffee & Park Bar.
The park has nearly 2 million visitors a year from across the globe, and over 1,200 people have become Conservancy members. Some of them first arrived as volunteers to help build the trolls, made friends along the way, and decided to stay involved. Dix Park has made extraordinary progress in its transformation, but there’s so much more to go. The people who choose to support it now will shape what families find there on the Saturdays to come.
Scan the QR code to donate, become a member or volunteer, and help build a park for everyone.
Sponsored by Dix Park Conservancy. dixparkconservancy.org
Keep exploring the Guide to Giving: Next up, Empower All, Inc. — or see all 18 nonprofits.
A version of this article originally appeared in the November 2026 issue of WALTER Magazine.
