Day four of my Big Give Christmas Challenge 2024 tips goes to grassroots conservation with the Whitley Fund for Nature.
It’s a sad truth that fundraising takes up about half of most charities’ income and resources. Anything they can do to make fundraising easier means that more money goes to the causes they support.
The Whitley Fund for Nature
Grassroots conservation projects are often the best way to protect wildlife and the places they live. Local communities know their homes, they want to protect them and they don’t waste the funding that they win.
The WFN awards grants to projects all over the world that conserve, preserve and restore the environment. Crucially, they’re driven by local leaders and communities. Sir David Attenborough is a trustee of the group, which has given £23 million to more 200 conservation leaders across 80 countries.
As well as their grassroots focus, I like the WFN because they reward evidence-based work driven by science. They prize integrity and inclusivity, and they encourage their project leaders to become a global community that help each other.
The 2024 awards assisted projects building canopy crossings for primates in the Amazon (see the video above), protecting owls in Nepal and red siskin birds in Guyana. They helped women conserving coral reefs in the western Pacific, people encouraging co-existence with langur monkeys in Bhutan, and those saving manatees in Cameroon.
In many cases, the projects help local communities assert their rights to their lands. The attention makes it easier to push back against pollution, deforestation and lack of official recognition.
If you want your money to straight to communities protecting the environment around their homes, the Whitley Fund for Nature will make good use of it.