In 1975, Mathews set up and ran a residential summer camp for disadvantaged children on her 100-acre farm in Redding, Connecticut. Toward the end her of life, Mathews, a passionate Environmentalist, made a perpetual donation of her 100-acre New Pond Farm to the Redding Land Trust, to ensure that it would retain its woods, fields, pond and marsh. The United Nations Association of the United States of America named Mathews one of Connecticut's outstanding women in 1987.