Chandler Legacy Society Testimonial

In the weeks following Wild Side, we circled back with Bill Brabson to thank him for volunteering that night to help with clean up. That’s when he shared that he’d put SCELP in his estate plan. In doing so, he became the most recent member of the Chandler Legacy Society, founded in 2020 in memory of SCELP founder Jimmy Chandler (1949-2010) to ensure the future of SCELP’s environmental advocacy efforts in South Carolina. When we asked Bill how he came to decide to include SCELP in his estate plan, he told us this story.
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After Betsy died, I got to revisit all those documents that were collecting dust: will, power of attorney etc. And after having to go through probate, I reached out to an attorney to ask what my options were and ended up totally opposite where I thought I would be with a living trust.
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Both our children were adopted and I knew I wanted to include the adoption agency we went through in North Carolina in the estate plan. And I knew Betsy would want us to include SCELP as well. She knew and got to be friends with SCELP founder Jimmy Chandler when it was just Jimmy. She would talk to him about sea turtles and he would talk about some wetlands that had just been filled in to make way for more development. His love for keeping South Carolina as natural as possible lit the spark for Betsy becoming so environmentally focused. Jimmy helped put her efforts as a community-minded artist, working to protect sea turtles along the shore in Georgetown, into a bigger context. I remember us being in Walmart and seeing Jimmy there and going up to him and saying, “You’re my hero.”
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Through over three decades of working with the SC Department of Natural Resources as Project Leader for the DeBordieu/Hobcaw/North Island Nest Protection Project, and later heading up the Beach Vitex Task Force for 8 years to get rid of a non-native plant, Betsy learned so much about how government works and doesn’t work. You can’t always count on the government to do the right thing, especially as it relates to environmental issues. If you cherish what South Carolina has and want to preserve it, you’ve got to be an advocate for organizations like SCELP. So we zeroed in on SCELP and the adoption agency as being importantto us, but especially to Betsy. She stayed friends with Jimmy until he died, and she was the happiest when she knew she was making a difference.

After she passed, I knew I had to get my ducks in a row. None of us want to think about estate planning, but we also don't know how long we have on this fragile planet. Careful planning is important but it's also an easy way to support those organizations that will help ensure a better life for our children and grandchildren.