The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund issues new statement following WallStreetBets donations
Following hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund has released a new statement.
Last week, members of WallStreetBets subreddit rallied together to send in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of donations to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. Now, the fund has released an official statement detailing how it helps gorillas and thanking the community for its efforts.
“We were surprised and honored by this sudden flood of generosity,” the post on the website reads. “The onset of the pandemic in 2020 made our work in the forests of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo more difficult, more costly — and more critical to the survival of gorillas and the humans who live nearby. This pandemic, which scientists agree likely began when a zoonotic disease “jumped” from wild animals to humans, made it clear that, while it is expensive to protect and maintain pristine forests, there is a greater cost to letting these forests be damaged.”
🚨WE HAVE NEWS 🚨 It’s safe to say that the #investor community on @reddit is not traditionally who we think of as our supporter base. But they definitely surprised and overwhelmed us over the weekend. A THREAD. @CNN @CNBC @business @WSJ pic.twitter.com/JRB1Gj1Mub
— Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund (@SavingGorillas) March 15, 2021
“The WallStreetBets donations will be used not only to protect gorillas, but to protect their forest home, which is the second largest tropical rainforest on the planet and one of our best natural defenses against climate change. As we often say: when you save gorillas, you save the planet.”
The statement then continues to breakdown the four pillars that the fund uses to help gorillas, to give donators a sense of how their money will be used. It’s unclear exactly how many adoptions were made possible by the donations that WallStreetBets and other donors pushed. However, a thread posted to Twitter on March 15 mentioned that over 2,000 new adoptions had been made possible at the time, with the donations totaling over $265,000 since March 13.
WallStreetBets is the Reddit group behind GameStop’s (GME) recent rise on the stock market, and it’s cool to see some of the profits from that movement being used to help support conservation groups like The Dian Fossey Fund. You can check the link above to read the organization’s full statement.
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