Photo by Josh Metten
Season’s Greetings from EcoTour Adventures! If you’ve been following along with us for the last two years, you know that in March of 2020, our founder, Taylor Phillips, joined forces with The WYldlife Fund to create a signature conservation fundraising initiative known as Wildlife Tourism for Tomorrow (WTFT). The goal of this initiative is simple: dollars from the tourism industry–of which wildlife watching is a huge part–are donated to WTFT to fund wildlife conservation projects throughout Wyoming. EcoTour Adventures contributes 1% of our revenues to WTFT, which means that if you’ve taken a tour with us in the last two years, your money has gone to this incredible cause!
Photo by ETA Naturalist Kelsey Wellington
To date, WTFT has raised $203,000 for Wyoming’s wildlife, and we have you–our wonderful guests and visitors to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem–to thank in part for this! Many of you have also chosen to donate an additional sum directly from your pockets, after experiencing this awe-inspiring landscape and building a connection with it. We at EcoTour Adventures are deeply grateful to all of you for supporting a cause we are deeply passionate about. We don’t want to just use the resource–the wildlife that you all come to see–we also want to give back. This is how we do that.
| Donation Source | Total Amount |
| Individual guests | $7,411.80 |
| EcoTour Adventures | $30,207.00 |
| Total raised from all sources* | $203,000 |
*All sources include 85 supporting businesses, which can be found here.
Last month at the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission meeting in Rock Springs, WY, WTFT announced $84,900 in gifts for “on the ground” wildlife conservation projects. To read more about each individual project, click on the links below:
$25,000 to the New Fork River Restoration
$25,000 to the South Park Wetlands Enhancement
$25,000 to Sagebrush Restoration in Grand Teton National Park
$9,900 to Wyoming Game and Fish Department's Cody Regional Office Beaver Holding Facility
So much of this was made possible thanks to you, our wonderful guests. We want to extend a heartfelt THANK YOU! to all of you for helping to make a difference in this beautiful state. It is our goal to preserve these wildlife populations for many years to come, so future generations can look upon these animals with the same awe and wonder you did when you first visited.
We hope you will keep WTFT in mind in the future, as the work of wildlife conservation never ends–in fact, it’s more important now than ever to protect our wildlife populations. Should you wish to contribute to this crucial initiative–whether for the first time or many times to come–please visit Wildlife Tourism for Tomorrow’s website to donate. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you, thank you, thank you.
We hope to see you out there in 2023!
Want to read more about the importance of WTFT’s mission? Read the article published by our very own guide, Kelsey Wellington, over at Writers on the Range!
Written by Kelsey Wellington, ETA Naturalist and Social Media Manager. Kelsey holds a BS in Wildlife Biology and an MFA in Creative Writing.
