Big Life Foundation USA
Big Life was founded in September 2010 by photographer Nick Brandt, conservationist Richard Bonham, and entrepreneur Tom Hill to address the dramatic escalation of poaching in East Africa.
Since its inception, Big Life has expanded to employ hundreds of local Maasai rangers – with more than 30 permanent outposts and tentbased field units, 14 patrol vehicles, 2 tracker dogs, and 2 planes for aerial surveillance.
As a result, Big Life has dramatically reduced poaching of all wildlife in the Amboseli-Tsavo-Kilimanjaro ecosystem. Our teams have facilitated thousands of arrests, including some of the most ruthless and prolific long-term poachers in the region. Big Life’s success sends a strong message that killing wildlife carries swift and serious punishment.
Big Life’s ethos: If conservation supports the people, then people will support conservation.
I’ve been a supporter of Big Life for almost five years now & will continue as a lifelong supporter. They have proven to be successful in all aspects of true conservation. I consider Big Life to be a model to all involved in the interest of helping protect all wildlife, habitats, as well as educate and support surrounding communities. - Jane
Financials
Programs
Wildlife Protection
Big Life strives to prevent the poaching of all wildlife—including thousands of migrating elephants, a growing lion population, and critically endangered Eastern black rhinos—within our area of operation. As one of the largest employers of local Maasai in the ecosystem, Big Life’s community rangers are expertly trained and well-equipped to tackle a variety of wildlife crimes, including combating wildlife trafficking. We track and apprehend poachers and collaborate with local prosecutors to ensure that they are punished to the fullest extent of the law.
Habitat Protection
The human-wildlife conflict in the ecosystem is a direct result of people and wildlife competing for limited resources in the same shrinking land areas. To reduce conflict, wildlife habitat must be strategically protected. One shining example is the Kimana Sanctuary, 5,700 acres in the heart of the ecosystem, which is important habitat for a variety of wildlife, including some of the world’s last remaining tusker elephants. Big Life manages both wildlife protection and tourism opportunities within the sanctuary, at the request of the Maasai community and in close coordination with local partners.
Human-Wildlife Conflict Mitigation
Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) takes three primary forms across Big Life’s area of operation: crops raided by wildlife, particularly elephants; livestock killed by predators, such as lions; and humans injured or killed due to living in close proximity with wildlife. Big Life works strategically to mitigate HWC, such as by deploying rapid response ranger teams to move elephants away from farms and building crop-protection fences to create a hard boundary between elephant habitat and agriculture areas. Big Life also manages an innovative livestock compensation program, the Predator Compensation Fund, which helps to reduce the motivation for retaliatory killing of predators in response to livestock depredation. As a result, the lion population in Big Life’s area of operation is one of the few populations in all of Africa that is growing, not declining.
Community Support
Winning the hearts and minds of the community and providing a mutual benefit to people through conservation is the only way to protect wildlife and wild lands far into the future. To that end, in addition to being one of the largest employers in the region through the employment of community rangers, Big Life provides a number of services in support of the community, including educational scholarships and healthcare and family planning initiatives, as well as responding to non-wildlife-related crimes and conducting search and rescue operations.
