Dear IonLife,
Firstly Brianna and I would like to say a really warm thank you and IonLife for your generous donation to our project – it just about doubled what we had raised so far, so it was no small sum.
Just to give you a quick outline of our work – a few months ago we were given the amazing opportunity of designing information signboards for the Adolpho Ducke Botanical Gardens of Manaus.
These gardens are inside a 100 km² ecological reserve in the middle of the Amazon and contain a huge number of plant and animal species. The staff has wanted to install signboards in different languages for 10 years but due to lack of funding this has never come to fruition.
These large ego-diverse gardens have so much potential because of how easily the outside world can access them through the city of Manaus and its international airport. The easier and faster outsiders can see how important the Amazon is to the world the greater the opposition will be to the continued large scale destruction of the Amazon jungle for agriculture and mining. At the moment these gardens are tragically under-utilized because the few guides that are there only do tours occasionally and do not speak English.
Our project is designing a number of educational signboards throughout the trails, and thus opening people’s eyes to the biodiversity, forest functions and plant-insect interactions around them in the forest. We’re writing signs in both English and Portuguese so that both locals and international visitors will be attracted to the gardens.
The response to our fundraising that we’ve received has been such an inspiration in our work. To realize how much support we have and to see how generously people offer money for a good cause like this has been wonderful. It has also meant that by raising our own funds we make ourselves completely independent of the lengthy and uncertain process of applying for government funding.
Warm regards,
Rebecca McCue and Brianna McNeillage Greene.
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