In our wild animals parks
Looking after animals in captivity and reintroducing them back into their natural habitat are only two strands of our work. The third is our focus on educating communities in both the UK and overseas; explaining how we can protect these vulnerable animals and their natural habitats.
A key aspect of our work in the Parks is with schools. In the academic year 2018-2019 we had 350 schools visit our parks and enjoy talks from our rangers on topics such as conservation, habitats, adaptations and many more. We have even given a talk to a school in France over Skype to 50 children!
We do presentations to outside organisations and groups across Kent and the South East. If you would like someone from The Aspinall Foundation to speak to your local group please contact us on 01303 234191.
Overseas
We work extensively with schools and local communities overseas. Our focus is changing the behaviour of local communities to help protect animals and local natural habitats.
For example, in Madagascar, we have distributed four thousand lemur notebooks to school children living around Andriantantely and CAZ west where the Greater Bamboo lemurs live. We have also developed community-based micro-projects to strengthen local community associations, improve training, support improved agricultural methods and support local education programmes.
We then work with local law enforcement to tackle the threats from destructive gold-mining and uncontrolled bush-fires. One project saw us distribute over 4,000 seedlings of native tree species to local communities as part of our community-based reforestation programme.
One focus is to help develop alternative income streams for local communities, which leads us to honey production. In addition to training local people we donated 11,000 seedlings and 40 bee-hives to increase new activity in Anaboazo. Keeping bees saves Lemurs!
We are proud to be registered with the UK’s Fundraising Regulator.