- April 16, 2025
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Conservancy of Southwest Florida President and CEO Rob Moher is fond of saying engagement in a nonprofit leads to investment.
For retired Naples CEO John Walter, who helmed both a telecom and packaging giant in his Corporate America career, it’s a bit of the opposite: He, along with his wife Carol, daughter Lindsay and family foundation, recently made an eye-popping investment in the conservancy — $25 million — and are as engaged in the nonprofit as they ever have been.
Walter, the former CEO and chairman of packaging, print, and supply chain giant R.R. Donnelly, among other roles, says the Naples-based conservancy’s mission, to protect Southwest Florida’s water, land, wildlife and future resonates with him and his family.
“The most important organization in the community, both today and probably accelerating into the future, is the conservancy, because what it does is help protect and preserve what we have and enhance it,” he says. “Also, as the demographics change in this community, we're going to (have) more younger people, and whatever we can do to help educate them, make them aware of the conservancy, the impact we have, and how they can participate in helping preserve what we have, to me, is a rich opportunity.”
Carol and John Walter have been in Southwest Florida for more than a decade, first in Boca Grande and later Naples, after moving from Chicago. With the John & Carol Walter Family Foundation, they have donated to multiple other local organizations, including the Gulfshore Playhouse; Naples Children & Education Foundation; the Naples Botanical Garden; and the Guadalupe Center.
“We realize we've been somewhat fortunate,” John Walter says in an interview, adding, “it’s deep into our mindset and psyche to pay attention to where we are and what we do in preserving and protecting the beauty we have in Naples."
Initially announced in January, the $25 million gift will serve as the catalyst of the conservancy’s new $70 fundraising campaign, Now & Forever: The Campaign to Protect our Quality of Life.
The campaign, officials say, is the first major formal fundraising effort for the conservancy in more than a decade and focuses on two pillars. One, at $20 million, is a dynamic nature experience designed to “transform the conservancy’s public-facing nature center into an interactive, world-class nature destination.”
Under that pillar, some $18 million of the Walter family gift will fund the creation of the John & Carol Walter Nature Experience, set to open in 2028 with immersive exhibits, hands-on learning and expanded programs. The remaining $7 million will establish two permanent endowments to provide generational support for the reimagined nature experience. That later part is key for Walter, who says he doesn’t want the center to be a “one and done” kind of place. “I want people to understand more about what (the conservancy) does and why it’s so important,” he says, adding he hopes visitors will say “‘I hope to have my children here, my grandchildren here.’”
The second pillar, $50 million, is to provide funding for the conservancy’s core teams in environmental research, public policy advocacy, education and wildlife rehabilitation, according to the statement. The 60-employee organization has $91.14 million in assets, its most recent public tax filings show. It was founded in 1964, when a group of citizens banded together, according to the group’s website, to protest and prevent a road from being built through Rookery Bay crossing Gordon Pass and into the Ten Thousand Islands. The conservancy now does work in Collier, Charlotte, Lee, Hendry and Glades counties.
Conversations about a donation as big as $25 million between the Walters and the conservancy date back two years.
“We didn't start out of the gates with this,” says Moher, the organization’s CEO, who adds the Walter family donation is one of the most important gifts ever made to conservation of Florida's land and resources. “He and his family clearly wanted to make an impactful commitment…and something that would last for generations. So it wasn't going to be something that was, just as John famously says, ‘a scent of perfume in the desert air.’ It had to be something that would be noticed, that would be impactful and that would be sustainable.”
Like several other highly-accomplished business leaders in the region donating large sums of money to nonprofits, Walter says he tracks not only the management, like Moher and his team, but the group’s mission, when choosing where to donate money. Both at the conservancy, in his view, are top notch.
“I think without talking about various communities in Florida, you can see a lot of them have grown to the point that they've lost a lot of their charm. They've lost a lot of what they had. And we want to do everything we can to kind of help protect and keep Naples as special as it is,” Walter says. “Did we do this for our ego in order to make a big splash? No, we did it because of the mission of the conservancy, what it is and how we can enhance it and leave a legacy for our family and for the community.”
