Dear Friends of Red Panda Network,
We have sincere gratitude for your support of our mission. Over the first half of this year we have been working hard to fulfill it. Over the last six months, we have added three new team members and three new board members. Each one of these members has done amazing work and I am honored by their dedication to empowering local villagers and saving red panda and their habitat. Foremost, I am honored by the dedication of our Nepal team. In just six short months, our Nepalese team has conducted research in a remote section of far northeastern Nepal, next to Mount Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, trained 13 new forest guardians, and led three ecotrips of visitors from Hong Kong and the United States. In the US, our dedicated team has done an amazing job supporting the Nepal team, creating our first international awareness campaign, International Red Panda Day, as well as managing our transition away from Earth Island Institute to be a stand-alone organization.
On the ground in Nepal, we focus on achieving several goals at once, conservation of red panda through community-based monitoring and poverty alleviation by providing some of the poorest people in Nepal with an alternative income source. Our goal is to create sustainable income sources for villagers. We plan to do this by conducting a carbon forestry project called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation or REDD for short. We believe that carbon finance is a way to fund long-term solutions to deforestation.
Time is essential for us to make this happen. An energy bill supporting REDD projects just passed the Senate and the compliance market is being created in the US. A generous donor has given us a $20,000 match toward starting our REDD project. If we do not raise the entire sum by the end of September, we will get nothing. To date, we have raised 55% of the match. Please help us by going online and donating today or if you are not interested in donating online, please send a check to:
Red Panda Network
[update 2012: new address]
1859 Powell St, Suite 100
San Francisco, CA 94133
Thank you again for your kind support and please consider sharing this with your family and friends,
Brian Williams
Chief Executive Officer, Red Panda Network
Mountain View, California
