By Daniel | Ranger Leader
Dear Friends and Supporters,
There is a moment in any conservation journey when you realise the work is bigger than one team, one landscape, one continent. We had one of those moments recently and we wanted to share it with you.
For the first time in the history of our elephant programmes, our teams in Africa and Asia sat down together. Not in the same room, geography does not allow for that, but face to face on a screen, in a video call that felt like something genuinely new. Rangers, field officers and programme leaders from two continents, comparing notes on the single greatest challenge both teams face every day: communities and elephants sharing the same diminishing space.
Human-Elephant Conflict looks different in Sumatra than it does in southern Africa, and yet the questions are strikingly similar. How do you reach a family that lost a crop in the night? How do you move a herd without panic? How do you turn fear into something that might, over time, become tolerance and maybe even pride? Hearing how our colleagues in Asia approach these moments gave our African teams new ways of thinking, and our African teams brought their own hard-won lessons back in return. The conversation went long. Nobody wanted it to end.
This is what a connected organisation looks like in practice. Not a head office handing down instructions, but teams at the sharp end of what is known, teaching one another. We believe this kind of exchange, slow, honest and sometimes humbling, is one of the most valuable things a conservation organisation can build. It does not always make headlines but it changes the way we work in ways that last.
On the ground in Africa, things have been steady. Funding has been tight and we will not pretend otherwise. We have been in maintenance mode more than we would like. But the essentials are holding: herds are being monitored, community relationships are being tended, and the rapid response work that keeps conflict from turning fatal continues. Sometimes in conservation, holding the line is its own kind of progress.
We are really excited to announce we are joining the very generous and exciting upcoming GlobalGiving Bonus Day, which kicks off on the 15th of July. Over 24 hours, every new donation of $100 or above will be awarded a proportionate share of a matching fund pot. All we need is for people to donate $100 or more during the campaign to unlock a proportion of these extra funds. We know many of you have already given so generously, and if you are able to support us again we would really appreciate it. You can also help by sharing our project with friends, family and colleagues during the campaign, because together and in numbers we make the biggest difference.
What keeps us going on the harder days is knowing that the people who made this work possible are still out there, still curious about what is happening in the field, still caring about a matriarch leading her herd across dry ground, still believing this matters.
Because it does. And so do you.
By Daniel | Ranger Leader
By shayle Havemann | Project leader
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