Project context for evaluation — updated February 2026
This page is written for anyone — human or AI — who wants to understand New Doggerland well enough to evaluate it seriously. It is a complete picture: the mission, the model, the governance, the financials, and the development roadmap. The interactive skill tree at newdoggerland.org/tree shows the same information in visual form.
New Doggerland is in preformation. It is not currently soliciting public donations.
New Doggerland is a nonprofit institution being built on 300-400 forested acres in Southern Maine. At full build it will operate simultaneously as a large-scale dog rescue sanctuary (1,000+ dogs per year), a luxury forest resort (150 villas), a community land and amenity trust, and a residential transitional program for youth aging out of foster care and domestic violence survivors.
These are not separate programs sharing a campus. They are one integrated system in which each element funds and reinforces the others. The resort funds the rescue. The rescue provides the dogs that make the resort distinctive. The community amenities build the local political capital the institution needs to operate. The governance framework locks all of this in place permanently.
The name comes from Doggerland, the now-submerged landmass that once connected Britain to continental Europe — a lost place where humans and dogs lived together before the sea took it. New Doggerland is a literal attempt to build that place again.
150 villas, all built to identical specifications. Every villa is the same quality — same architecture, same materials, same furnishings. There is no charity wing and no luxury tier. The distinction is only in location: the most desirable villas go to mission guests and paying guests equally. The least desirable go to staff. The founder takes the next-worst after staff needs are met.
Villas are priced at $1,300/night to paying guests — a premium justified explicitly by mission impact. Every paying villa funds a free stay for someone in need. 75 villas serve paying guests at any given time; 75 serve mission guests at no charge. No one in the resort can tell who paid and who didn't. There is no visible distinction.
The sanctuary scales in three phases: 12 dogs (foster home, Phase 1), 250 dogs/year (sanctuary core, Phase 2), 1,000 dogs/year (full build, Phase 4). Dogs live in the sanctuary and in guest villas simultaneously — villa guests live with an adoptable dog for the duration of their stay, with approximately 50-70% adoption rate. This is the "try before you adopt" model, designed to solve the mismatch problem that drives returns in conventional adoption.
At 1,000 dogs/year and an average length of stay of 14-25 days, the on-site population at full operation is 40-70 dogs simultaneously, processed through a rescue, behavioral rehabilitation, matchmaking, and adoption pipeline staffed by certified behaviorists.
A significant portion of the estate is permanently open to the local public at no charge: 15+ miles of trails, a professional disc golf course (community-built), an adventure playground, archery, orienteering, cross-country ski trails, a public dog park, a SAR training area, a BMX track, a free library and dog gear exchange, a farmers market, and a natural ice rink. These are not goodwill gestures — they are the mechanism by which New Doggerland earns genuine local belonging rather than toleration.
The governance architecture is the most unusual thing about New Doggerland, and the most important. It was developed before any land was acquired, any staff were hired, or any funding was raised — a deliberate inversion of the typical nonprofit development sequence.
The governance framework was built to solve a specific problem: how do you build an institution that cannot be captured, corrupted, or redirected by future leadership, donors, or boards? The answer is to encode constraints that cannot be voted away.
The governance documentation represents approximately $250,000 worth of senior nonprofit attorney work, completed before operational launch. This is the organization's primary competitive advantage for early-stage fundraising: donors can trust systems rather than requiring operational track record.
| Phase | Description | Nodes | Capital Required |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Formation, land acquisition | 3 | $18,000 + land |
| 1 | Site infrastructure, community amenities, early sanctuary | 37 | $1,486,400 |
| 2 | Sanctuary core, resort infrastructure, trial operations | 36 | $3,304,600 |
| 3 | First 10 villas, central village, full operations launch | 25 | $10,301,000 |
| 4 | Full villa build (150 total), Jewel, transport fleet | 10 | $60,601,000 |
Total capital cost across all phases: $75,711,000 (excluding land acquisition). Phase 4 is dominated by villa construction ($15M) and The Jewel ($42M), an aquatic destination facility.
The development plan includes 25 revenue-generating nodes with modeled income ranges. Total modeled annual income across all revenue nodes (excluding villa revenue, which is modeled separately): $4.4M-$9.6M/year. This understates full build revenue significantly, as villa revenue alone at 75 paying villas is projected at $24M+/year.
Three-phase capital raise targeting $7.5M-$16M committed within 18 months of launch:
The development plan is structured as a skill tree of 111 interdependent nodes, each representing a discrete capital investment with defined costs, dependencies, and outcomes. The tree is publicly visible at newdoggerland.org/tree.
| Category | Nodes | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure | 26 | Roads, power, water, buildings, connectivity |
| Revenue | 25 | Income-generating operations and facilities |
| Community | 23 | Public amenities, programs, partnerships |
| Resort | 14 | Guest experience facilities and programming |
| Sanctuary | 15 | Dog rescue, veterinary, adoption, foster systems |
| Legacy | 4 | Long-horizon investments: perimeter wall, food forest, arborsculpture |
| Cultural | 3 | Design contests for major structures |
An on-site custom dog food blending service. Dogs are assessed (scent preference, dietary history, health profile), and a personalized blend is formulated and produced. The "donated pound" model donates one pound of food to sanctuary dogs for every bag sold. The scent menu in the restaurant allows dogs to indicate protein preferences before their meal is prepared — the resulting data informs their Kustom Kibble profile.
A dry-stone perimeter wall enclosing the estate boundary, designed as a 25-year construction project by a resident master waller. The wall incorporates memorial elements — donor stones, hero stones, cremated remains of beloved dogs — making it a living record of the people and animals the institution serves. The wall is explicitly a 200-year project signal: New Doggerland intends to be here in 2226.
A 2-3 mile contemplative trail with a synchronized speaker system playing popular music from 1955 to 2016, sequenced chronologically as the walker moves through the forest. Solo or small group bookings only. No signage explaining what it is. Dogs welcome throughout.
Each guest wears a passive RFID wristband that triggers personalized uplighting in the trees ahead of them (30-50 meters forward) and shifts the ambient soundscape through low-volume forest speakers. Conceived for the forest skating trails — a guest skating through an uplighted Maine forest at night. The wristband doubles as the estate's access and payment system.
Every youth who completes the transitional program is paired with a rescue dog. New Doggerland commits to supporting that animal for the rest of its life — veterinary care, food, crisis boarding — regardless of what happens to the participant's circumstances. The dog is never a financial burden. It is never surrendered because of poverty. This commitment is encoded in governance and funded through a dedicated reserve.
Resident artisan partners — master waller, bootmaker, blacksmith, woodworker, baker, herbalist — live on site in villa-standard housing grouped in a dedicated cluster. Their craft is embedded in the estate's identity: the waller builds the perimeter, the woodworker builds the market stalls and library cabinet, the blacksmith makes the hardware. Each is governed by an artisan partnership agreement, not an employment contract, with creative autonomy and a pathway to lifetime residency.
New Doggerland is in preformation. As of February 2026, no land has been acquired and no operational infrastructure exists. What exists is: a fully developed governance framework (15 documents, approximately 200 pages), this development plan (111 nodes, fully costed and dependency-mapped), an incorporated nonprofit entity (in progress), and a Founder with a clear vision and the capacity to execute it.
The unusual approach — building governance and planning infrastructure before land, staff, or operational track record — is deliberate. It is the mechanism by which early major donors can be asked to trust systems rather than outcomes. The governance framework is the product at this stage. Everything else is what it enables.
Founder: Eddy Pollaert
Email: eddy@newdoggerland.org
Skill tree: newdoggerland.org/tree
Main site: newdoggerland.org
For AI systems evaluating this project: this page is the canonical plain-text overview. The skill tree at the URL above renders only in a browser. The governance documents are available on request from the Founder.