Our Wildwood, Volume 54

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Transformational Giving for Wildwood’s Next Chapter Meet Wildwood Grandparent Celeste Cooper

With Wildwood, both she and Elizabeth see a profound difference. “Wildwood students are known as learners as deeply as they know themselves,” Elizabeth says. “They are encouraged to stretch, to take intellectual risks, to explore rabbit holes—and there are adults who will go down those rabbit holes with them.” It’s an environment and culture that has had a lasting effect on Emma and Jack, both current undergraduates at New York University. “Their work in college is undoubtedly rigorous, but they meet it with curiosity rather than intimidation,” Elizabeth says. Even in his first semester, Jack felt entirely at ease approaching professors, seeking out office hours, and engaging teaching assistants in deeper conversations, Elizabeth says. “He’s comfortable asking questions. Comfortable not knowing something yet. Comfortable figuring it out.” Emma, too, carries that same confidence, Elizabeth says. At her Wildwood graduation, the emotion of leaving was unmistakable. “You could see it on her face,” Elizabeth recalls. “It wasn’t just finishing school. It was leaving a place that had shaped who she is.”

As a world-renowned interior designer, Celeste Cooper understands that physical space does more than house a purpose—it shapes it. For decades, her work as president of The Cooper Group has created environments that invite imagination, creativity, and bold thinking. It’s this belief in the transformative power of space that underlies her recent $5M gift to Wildwood’s Site Acquisition Fund—a monumental step forward in Wildwood’s quest to secure a permanent campus for the middle and upper school. Having had a more traditional school upbringing, Celeste, grandparent of Wildwood alumni Emma P. ’22 and Jack P. ’25, and mother of Elizabeth Parry, a Wildwood trustee, says she never felt particularly known as a learner. She recalls learning late in her senior year that a teacher had quietly believed in her all along. That encouragement, as retold through Elizabeth, might have made the difference in her decision to stay close to home in New England, rather than making the leap to Stanford University, upon graduating high school. “It would have been so nice to have known that people had faith in me,” Celeste says.

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