Join hands with us and become a land conservation champion-- not just on Giving Tuesday but every single day
- Lorna Visser
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
A personal plea from Lorna Visser, Valhalla Foundation for Ecology director
Hello from Lorna, your friendly VFE director. My friends know that I believe in vast abundance -- and that makes me comfortable asking you for sustaining support today. Here's what I need to ask you, from the bottom of my heart...
Will you become a monthly donor so we can keep doing our important restoration work? I hope you will ask yourself: is today my day to become a super-star?
And why am I asking you for a monthly gift? Because when we can count on your support every month -- come what may -- it means we can spend less time on fundraising. And spending less time on administration means spending more time saving wild places for wild things. We all want that, right?
Convinced? Don't like reading long posts? Click the button below to set up your monthly donation and you're done, with our deepest thanks!
Decades ago, I found my life's purpose in environmental activism. It was the devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill that convinced me I needed to change my life, get out of the corporate world, and instead work to make the earth better.
In the early 2000s, I joined the Valhalla Foundation for Ecology to co-ordinate the acquisition of the Valhalla Mile property on Slocan Lake in southeastern BC. Other land acquisitions soon followed including a large property in the Chilcotin region of BC (the Jaŝ Chinook Salmon Nature Sanctuary) and then what has become my pride and joy: the Snk'mip Marsh Nature Sanctuary at the north end of Slocan Lake. These days, I'm the full-time, volunteer Executive Director of the VFE. I'm fortunate that I can volunteer -- I do it because the work is its own reward.
Recently, these sightings filled me with joy:
Seeing Snk'mip marsh rebound from deep ecological damage (after doing eight years of intense restoration work).
Seeing a painted turtle crane its neck toward the sun, basking in a pond where a decade ago there was only a knapweed-choked gravel pit -- an ecological dead-zone.
Seeing endangered Chinook salmon spawning in the creek we protected that runs through the Jaŝ Chinook Salmon Nature Sanctuary in the Chilcotin
Downloading photos from a remote camera to see a bear scratching its back at a rub tree!
Pulling weeds alongside my dedicated colleagues, then replanting with native plants... getting our hands dirty in service to Mother Earth.
Seeing a span of shoreline (an area that used to be crammed with partygoers, trucks and trailers) now a lushly re-vegetated natural area with beautiful willows and life-sustaining plants: it's now a home for shy, shoreline-nesting sandpipers.
Watching a Great Blue Heron on its long, backwards-bending legs, stalking fish in the marsh. In decades past that bird would have been quickly frightened away by the roar of a bulldozer.
We bought that property and restored it. Today it is a haven for scores of threatened and endangered species.
Saving Snk'mip is the greatest achievement of my life... but the work continues and that requires funds -- and for that we need your support.
So, Do You Want to Feel Great?
We live in an era of climate disasters (intense heat, wildfires, floods, erratic weather) and biodiversity collapse (for example, the loss of 80% of birds in the last 50 years, a statistic that breaks my heart). Not to mention all the human suffering and horror bombarding us daily on the news.
In these troubled times, I find it a joy and a privilege to do work that secures and restores wild places, work that makes this planet a better place to live. That makes me feel good every day. I'm inviting you to share the wonderful feeling of knowing you are doing good every day.
We need reliable operating funds for a myriad of routine, unsexy expenses necessary to keep the VFE ticking along (want to know what's not sexy? I've listed some of those things below*).
Why Monthly Giving Is Vital (and Why Foundations are SO Frustrating)
A reliable flow of funds in the form of monthly donations is the best way to secure vital operating support. But it's not the sort of thing that foundations or institutional funders want to fund: they want shiny new projects with ground-breaking, scintillating deliverables never before seen on planet earth.
Honestly, it can be frustrating to be on the 'grant grind' -- struggling to stay ahead of funders' 'flavours of the month' as they shift their priorities and change what they will fund (and unfortunately they do this with vexing regularity).
Thus monthly donors are key to a stable and effective organization.
That's why today I'm approaching you as someone who shares our conservation values and vision to ask for your ongoing support.
A monthly gift doesn't need to be a princely sum... $20/month, $10/month, $7.50/month (heck, even $5/month makes a difference). And it's easy, just fill in the form (link below) and your gift will be processed every month by our partner organization Canada Helps (which is itself a charity). We are so grateful to Canada Helps for this service!
You'll get a charitable donation receipt for the sum of your monthly gifts each year before income-tax filing time and of course all gifts are tax deductible.
You'll find more information on all our work (including shiny new projects with scintillating deliverables never before seen on planet earth) elsewhere on this website. Have a click around but please come back here to become a monthly donor.
If you've read this far, it means you've decided to help. Click here to be whisked effortlessly to our monthly donation form on the Canada Helps giving portal... and please do it now, before the next distraction of your busy day intervenes. We would be so grateful.
Yours in solidarity for the earth,
- Lorna Visser, Director
* What's unsexy? Things like:
Doing communications and outreach, maintaining an engaging website, doing social media
Paying for email accounts
Keeping the lights on and the phones operating
Maintaining a post office box for our official mailing address
Paying a bookkeeper to ensure all our financial transactions are recorded appropriately
Attending to government filings to follow all regulations
Keeping up to date on regulations and all the legal requirements for our work
Engaging the services of experts when necessary to protect the properties we steward
Engaging professional biologists or botanists to ensure our restoration work is done in the most effective way possible
Purchasing plants (2,000 plants thus far and still going strong!) and special seed mixtures for restoring habitat
Paying crews to pull weeds
Travel costs to monitor and maintain the nature sanctuaries we steward in perpetuity...
I could go on but I won't!
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