![]() De Rossi explained that when she first met DeGeneres, she asked who she admired most. The project was first announced in 2018 on The Ellen DeGeneres Show by Portia De Rossi, DeGeneres’s wife, who pledged to pay for its construction as a 61st birthday present to the talk show host. The campus includes three main buildings-the Cindy Broder Conservation Gallery, the Rob and Melani Walton Education Center, and the Sandy and Harold Price Research Center-as well as housing for 30 visiting students and researchers. A place where we can bring career scientists together to think about what are the solutions for conservation and climate change.” This campus serves as a training ground, not just for Rwanda but internationally. “We’re in the midst of the sixth mass extinction of biodiversity on the planet, and all the data is telling us how important conservation activities are. ![]() Tara Stoinski, president and CEO of the Fossey Fund, said during the opening ceremony on June 7. “This campus couldn’t have come at a more critical time,” Dr. The $15 million, 12-acre campus provides Fossey Fund with the space and tools to continue to protect the critically endangered mountain gorilla population, as well as accelerate its scientific research and train the next generation of conservationists. Last month, the Fossey Fund officially opened its new Ellen DeGeneres Campus near the entrance to Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, one of the four national parks in East Africa with mountain gorilla populations and the only one in Rwanda. ![]() Now, thanks to the opening of a new center for tourism, science, and education, it will be able to. Even though its work had made the gorillas one of the all too rare conservation success stories, it knew it needed some assistance to grow further. The team moved from the forest camp to Musanze following the Rwandan Genocide and for the past two decades, the DFGF worked out of cramped, rented facilities more than 20 miles away from the gorillas it served. While the work has never stopped-not even after Fossey’s untimely death in 1985-the group never really had a proper home. ![]() Those tents were the start of a now 55-year-old internationally renowned research mission known as the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund -one of the world’s longest-running conservation organizations-that has seen the gorilla population rebound to more than 1,000. When conservationist Dian Fossey set up two small tents in the wilds of Rwanda’s Virunga Mountains in 1967, fewer than 500 mountain gorillas existed in the wild, and their numbers were falling rapidly due to poaching and habitat loss. ![]()
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