This spring, JGI successfully completed its first crowdfunding campaign for Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots in Tanzania, raising over $16,000 via Pozible. The project aims to engage students from Sokoine Primary School in a study of local plants found in a nearby forest reserve.
Having protected the forest reserve for a number of years now, the students are eager to spread information about the medicinal benefit of plants found in the forest. In doing so they hope that they will raise other community member’s sense of motivation to protect the forest.
In the coming months more schools and students will become involved in the project, engaging the local community to learn about herbal medicine along with them. They will receive training in herbal medicine, and participate in the creation of materials that will help spread knowledge of medicinal value of plants among other members of the local community.
In addition to following through on the Herbal Medicine project this month, JGI is also launching a new campaign to build a new solar array, an electrical installation that collects light energy from the sun and stores it in batteries, at the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center in the Republic of Congo.
From June 11 to July 9, 2014 JGI will be raising $32,000 to upgrade the sanctuary’s existing unreliable array to provide an efficient source of energy and meet the needs of the sanctuary’s larger than planned population of chimpanzees.
Now old and war-torn, the existing array has become unreliable and needs to be replaced so that sanctuary staff will have an environmentally-friendly source of electricity for food storage, medical equipment and even backup batteries for safety fencing surrounding chimpanzee enclosures.
For a preview of the campaign, watch the video below, and come June 11 consider contributing and sharing the campaign with friends and followers.
