Pathways to Freedom: The future starts today!

Full of hope and optimism, but aware of the immense challenges ahead, Born Free launches Pathways to Freedom.  

This visionary, yet practical plan builds on all we have already achieved for wild animals, but will help us deliver even greater impact in the years ahead. With your support, Born Free is relentlessly seeking a kinder, better future, where people and wildlife can coexist.

PATHWAYS TO FREEDOM: OUR VISION

If you share our compassionate 2030 vision, you have a key role to play, as our Co-Founder, Executive President Will Travers OBE, explains.  

Will Travers OBE (c) George Leakey

The first question many people ask is: Why do you need a new strategy at all?!

Well, after over 40 years working for wildlife in need, whether in captivity or in their natural habitat – we must always ask the tough questions.

• Are we being as efficient as we can be?
• Are we making a lasting, positive impact?
• What have we learned?
• Can we do better?

So, in consultation with colleagues from across the organisation, including numerous team members as well as Trustees, and guided by an expert outside facilitator, we’ve spent much of the past year considering, challenging, reviewing, understanding, and assessing our performance.

Our objective? Simple. To learn from all we’ve been doing across a range of activities, from the year of our inception – 1984 – to the present day. And then imaging what the next five years will look like.

Of course, it would be foolish to say this is an entirely new strategy. That would diminish and even negate the value of all that has gone before. This is an evolution, not a revolution!

Our core principles remain intact, although the way we describe them will be better articulated than ever before. However, when it comes to our four disciplines, we’ll continue to pay relentless attention to:

1. Individual wild animal welfare, rescue and care;
2. Compassionate conservation;
3. Community engagement and empowerment;
4. Promoting wildlife-friendly policies.

I’m genuinely excited by how we have baked them into our future plans, and I think you will be too.

For the first time, our strategy sets out four Cross Organisational Objectives, rather than our work sitting in distinct silos. Our activities will respond holistically in an integrated way to a range of needs and objectives, across the broadest possible operational landscape.

Let me give just one example. Born Free’s work in our homeland of Meru, Kenya, focuses on four of our six, newly-defined, key species and groups of animals – elephants, lions, giraffe, and rhino. Protecting them, supporting their conservation, lies at the heart of Born Free.

However, our cross-disciplinary approach means we must engage even more profoundly, and widely, to have the lasting impact we seek.

These are all part of our Five-Year Strategy:

• Helping communities better manage the area’s vulnerable water resources so both people and wildlife have enough. 
• Helping create and organise local Village Savings and Loans Associations which empower mainly local women to develop alternative, environmentally-sustainable, wildlife-friendly livelihoods. 
• Assisting local farmers protect their crops from marauding elephants through the installation of bee-hive fences (elephants are afraid of bees – who knew) which also produce nutritious and commercially viable honey. 
• Directly helping homesteads better protect their livestock from predators, tangibly benefitting the lives of hundreds of people, and potentially eliminating revenge attacks by farmers against carnivores. 

When Born Free started, way back when I was 24 years old, I didn’t know or understand any of this, or how interconnected everything is. Now, I begin to get it. I have learned and I have evolved. So have my colleagues – and so has the Foundation.

So, welcome to our new Five-Year-Strategy, which sets the scene for the next impactful chapter in our development as a charity, and as humane beings.

The past four decades have been quite a journey. But I’m just as excited about the years ahead. I hope you are too and will want to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us as we do our best for wild animals in need, nature, biodiversity, communities. And the planet.

PATHWAYS TO FREEDOM: OUR NEW STRATEGY