Sri Lankan elephants and families need your help

Amber Kazansky is organizing this fundraiser.

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Your urgent help is needed to continue Project Orange Elephant. After the horrendous attacks on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka, the tourism industry is greatly suffering. Due to these tragic incidents, volunteer arrivals in support of Project Orange Elephant has dropped from 30 volunteers per month to zero.

What is Project Orange Elephant? It is a community-based conservation initiative started by theSri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society as a solution to human-elephant conflict. People and elephants often compete for resources, leading to devastating repercussions for the farmers, their families, and the elephants. Competition with wild elephants for adequate space for agriculture, human settlements, and other forms of human development creates deadly situations for both humans and elephants.

Did you know that the Sri Lankan elephants don’t like citrus? Our scientists conducted research and found that elephants have a natural aversion to citrus plants. With this finding the Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society established Project Orange Elephant to encourage and support farmers to plant orange trees in their farms.

The goals of Project Orange Elephant are to:
1.    Provide farmers with a sustainable livelihood.
2.    Minimize conflicts with elephants.
3.    Create an environment for coexistence where people and elephants can survive without the fear of harassment, injury, and death.

This is how Project Orange Elephant is having a positive impact and benefiting farmers and elephants. The project protects the elephants from the violent retaliation for damaging crops while providing a sustainable, supplementary income for the farmers. From the help of sponsors and donations, 203 farmers in 14 villages are participating and benefiting from Project Orange Elephant, and our project continues to grow.

After the recent devastating attack on Sri Lanka, volunteers are no longer coming to help our mission. This is where your kindness and generosity will make an enormous impact. We are humbly asking for any donation you can make to go towards continuing our efforts. No donation amount is too small. We ask that you please share this fundraiser with your friends, colleagues, and family.

Every dollar donated will go to the Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society and Project Orange Elephant. Your donations will go directly towards the operational costs it takes to continue our efforts, allowing us to maintain the existing farms and protect the elephants and families in Sri Lanka that rely on Project Orange Elephant to create an environment of peaceful coexistence.

Donations from this campaign will be withdrawn by me personally into my own bank account and then directly wire transferred to Ravi Corea, President of the Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society. Every dollar collected will go to their conservation group. I know Ravi through my mother, who visited him in the Spring of 2019 to see the efforts of Project Orange Elephant firsthand.

Click here to find out more about Project Orange Elephant or watch our YouTube video here.