Greg Carr’s Big Gamble

Greg Carr, keynote speaker at the 2011 Global Donors Conference has been profiled in numerous publications including the Smithsonian. An excerpt from the article is posted below – but you can read the whole thing by clicking here! We look forward to sharing more of the articles with you over the next few months in preparation for his speech on Friday, April 1st.

What Carr has embarked upon is one of the largest individual commitments in the history of conservation in Africa. To restore Gorongosa National Park, he has pledged as much as $40 million over 30 years, an almost unheard-of time frame in a field where most donors—governments and nonprofit organizations alike—make grants for four or five years at most. He also plans one of the largest animal reintroduction efforts on the continent and hopes to answer one of the most debated questions in conservation today: how to boost development without destroying the environment.

His efforts come against a backdrop of worldwide biodiversity loss, which is at its worst in developing regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where conflict and poverty accelerate natural resource destruction. Last year, the World Conservation Union reported that 40 percent of the species the group assesses are under threat of extinction.

Gorongosa, Carr believes, will change all that.

The park was once one of the most treasured in all of Africa, 1,525 square miles of well-watered terrain with one of the highest concentrations of large mammals on the continent—thousands of wildebeest, zebra and waterbuck, and even denser herds of buffalo and elephant than on the fabled Serengeti Plain. In the 1960s and ’70s, movie stars, astronauts and other celebrities vacationed in Gorongosa; tourists arrived by the busload. Tippi Hedren, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, was inspired by Gorongosa’s lions to build her own exotic cat preserve outside Los Angeles. Astronaut Charles Duke told his safari guide that visiting Gorongosa was as thrilling as landing on the moon.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/mozambique.html#ixzz1CLLXzDFa

Keynote Speaker Confirmed: Greg Carr, Philanthropist & Human Rights Activist

We are pleased to announce that one of the keynote speeches at the Pacific NW Global Donors Conference will be delivered by entrepreneur, human rights activist and philanthropist, Gregory C. Carr.

Greg Carr is leading a bold philanthropic venture to restore Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, which was once described as the place “where Noah left his ark”. The Carr Foundation has committed $40 million dollars over 30 years to protect and restore the park’s ecosystem, and to help develop an eco-tourism industry in the communities surrounding the park. By reintroducing animal species (elephants, hippos and other bulk grazers) to the land, creating jobs within the park, funding schools and health clinics and training local farmers, the Carr Foundation (in it’s partnership with the government of Mozambique) has embarked on an ambitious restoration effort.

Carr’s environmental work in Africa is supplemented by his commitment to human rights in the Pacific NW. Born and raised in Idaho, Carr purchased the Aryan Nations compound in Northern Idaho, following a successful lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of two victims of attacks by security guards near the compound. The lawsuit effectively bankrupted the far-right white supremacist organization. He then dismantled the compound, turned it into a peace park and signed the deed over to the North Idaho College Foundation in 2002.

We invite you to read more about Greg Carr and his philanthropic ventures and work as a human rights activist. Carr has been profiled in Outside Magazine, The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

Don’t miss the opportunity to hear Greg Carr speak at the 2011 Pacific NW Global Donors Conference on April 1, 2011. Register now!