Big Life Foundation Usa

Community and outreach:fighting wildlife crime helps the ecosystem today, but winning the hearts and minds of the community and providing a mutual benefit through conservation is the only way to protect wildlife and wild lands far into the future. Big life foundation usa invests in the future of participating communities by funding teachers' salaries and providing educational scholarship funds for hundreds of local maasai students in kenya. These salaries and scholarships are distributed to big life kenya who also selects the recipients. When the entire community benefits from conservation efforts and recognizes the value of protecting the ecosystem, enforcement becomes self-policing. (continued on schedule o - supplemental information) in 2024, big life foundation usa provided financial assistance for 835 students at varying levels of education and paid the salaries of 8 teachers. Multiple conservation-oriented student and community meetings and field trips were also held in 2024.

Human-wildlife conflict:big life foundation usa funds collaborative programs to help mitigate the negative impact of human-wildlife interaction, such as mitigating crop-raiding by hungry elephants, both for the people and the animals through the construction of wildlife exclusion fences to keep elephants out of crops. In 2024, 53 crop raids were prevented. We also fund a predator compensation fund via grants to big life limited (big life kenya), a related organization. For maasai herders, their cattle are their livelihood. When livestock falls prey to predators, the herders are financially disadvantaged and justifiably frustrated. (continued on schedule o - supplemental information)to prevent losses that lead to herders retaliating with spears or poisoned carcasses, big life foundation usa funds programs to encourage improved fencing and husbandry practices. In the event that an animal is lost to a predator, the herder is compensated for a percentage of the market value of the animal, using funds from the predator compensation fund. This small consolation is significant to the maasai, and as a result, retaliatory killings have been reduced significantly. In 2024, we funded the successful intervention by rangers against 1 attempted retaliatory lion hunt, and our grants to the predator compensation fund were used to reimburse participating community members a total of $77,599 for verified deaths by predation of livestock.