The Elizabeth River Project receives its largest donation ever

$2.1M will provide boost needed to build a green lab

NORFOLK — The Elizabeth River Project’s threestory, green lab, which will be built along the Elizabeth River on Colley Avenue in Norfolk, will bear the name of its largest donors.

Norfolk residents and longtime supporters Pru and Louis Ryan donated $2.1 million to the organization’s Next Wave capital campaign a few months ago, and the name was announced Thursday, said Marjorie Mayfield Jackson, the project’s executive director.

By 2022, the Elizabeth River Project’s Pru and Louis Ryan Resilience Lab, or Ryan Resilience Lab for short, will be complete.

The building will be the first urban redevelopment project in Virginia intentionally built in a floodplain to fight against sea level rise, the nonprofit said in a news release.

The lab will serve as a national resilience model and include a waterfront park, solar panels, a green roof and living walls, the release said.

Organizers said t he Colley Avenue location is ideal because Norfolk has one of the most accelerated rates of sea level rise in the world.

The building will have a research dock, allowing ongoing study to address climate change issues. The waterfront Learning Park will be open to the public.

“We had decided a number of years ago to support our primary areas of interest — the environment and education, and the Elizabeth River Project touches both,” said Louis Ryan, the retired general counsel of Landmark Communications, which formerly owned of The Virginian-Pilot. Ryan has served on the Elizabeth River Project’s board of directors since 2006.

Ryan also is co-chair of the Next Wave campaign, along with Bruce Bradley, a former Pilot publisher.

Most of the Next Wave campaign’s funds are being used to build the lab, but other goals include doubling the size of the Elizabeth River Project’s education headquarters at Paradise Creek Nature Park and building a new home port for the Elizabeth River Project’s Dominion Energy Learning Barge in Chesapeake.

Organizers said they’re grateful for the Ryan family’s donation because it will help countless Hampton Roads residents and businesses.

The Elizabeth River was once considered to be one of the most polluted rivers on the Chesapeake Bay, and the project ’s efforts have helped reduce contamination in the river by hundreds of millions of pounds, the release said.

The group also has been able to restore and conserve thousands of acres of wetlands, oysters and other wildlife habitats.

“Restoring an urban river once presumed dead requires an enormous amount of heavy lifting,” said Jackson, the project’s executive director.

“The Elizabeth River Project forever will be indebted to the Ryans as the lead investors in a campaign that will do more to set our mission up for success than anything in our nearly 30-year history.”

For more information, visit elizabethriver.org.