Right now during the month of December, your donation to Channel Islands Restoration is doubled. An anonymous group of donors have pooled their money and pledged to match every dollar we fundraise with a dollar of their own - up to $6,500. If we don’t raise a matching $6,500, then we’ll only receive a respective percentage of the match.
Your contribution to Channel Islands Restoration is vitally important. Habitat loss is one of the leading causes of the Sixth Great Extinction, and we’re working as hard as we can to ensure that our Central Coast – a biodiversity hotspot – remains resilient to this crisis through direct habitat restoration for today, and environmental education for tomorrow. Channel Islands Restoration is the only non-profit on the Central Coast that engages in every aspect of habitat restoration: drafting a restoration proposal, eradicating invasive plants, propagating local native plants, and ultimately installing the native plants to recreate resilient native habitat that our local species rely on.
All the while, we engage the community via volunteer opportunities and educational events. Your donation to CIR ensures that we have the resources to see the entire process through. It’s a lot of work, but with work at more than 90 project sites over the past 17 years, you can be confident that CIR has the experience to put your donation to good work.
This past year has been our busiest yet, with projects from San Nicolas Island to the San Rafael Wilderness and everywhere in between, and we couldn’t have done it without your support. So much of this growth came because of people like you. Just over a year ago, only about 100 people had donated to CIR and last November we challenged you to double that. As this year begins to wind down, we’ve received donations from over 200 individuals and look at what we’ve accomplished together: growing over 16,000 plants grown on San Nicolas Island alone this year, surveying and eradicating tamarisk from 40 miles of backcountry wilderness, surveying for endangered plants, getting school kids on the islands, hosting natural history train trips up the coast, leading jeep trips through the mountains, and so much more.
Yet there is still so much work to do and we’re not shying away.
However, without your help, we can’t continue to grow. The well of federal funding and private grant money is drying up in today’s political climate. Without those funds, we can’t continue our work without your help.
If you give this December, you can double your impact and ensure that we’re able to continue our work together through 2018 and decades to come. Your donation ensures that we can continue to create and restore critical habitat along our Central Coast and that we can continue to provide environmental education opportunities to our community.