The Gail E. Abrams Wildlife Ambassador Fund

Our Wild Neighbors program focuses on exploring the world of wildlife with a special focus on what people can do to help wild animals. This is a very popular program for classroom teachers. However, with minimal funding in NC public schools lately, teachers don’t always have the funding for their programs. Though sometimes, those educators get creative.

Last year, Ms. Spady, an Elementary school teacher, used a funding website (donorschoose.org) to raise money for her classroom. These funds were specifically used to bring our wildlife ambassadors into her classroom. This allowed her students to interact with native wildlife they would normally never encounter. Ms. Spady had this to say about our program and her students:

“This was a WONDERFUL experience for my students! There were smiles non-stop as the animals visited our classroom. It amazed my students that the animals that they saw could be found in North Carolina. Since we began to learn about our home state, North Carolina, this was a great way to get my students to become more interested. From this, they were able to choose one of the animals that visited and do a project on it. Since they had actual pictures of them petting these animals, they were very excited to display these finished projects for other students to see.”

To educate the public on conservation-related issues and to truly create change in our younger generations, it takes a village. Your support to help us care for our ambassadors is the first step in educating future generations. Without healthy ambassadors, Ms. Spady and her students wouldn’t be able to learn all about our native wildlife and without Ms. Spady’s fundraising abilities, her students wouldn’t have been able to educate other students about how amazing our backyard wildlife is!