Ellen Degeneres Campus Of The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund In Rwanda

Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Rwanda: The Ellen DeGeneres Campus, officially known as the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, was established in February 2022. The Dian Fossey Fund needed help finding a permanent home, so the Ellen Fund was created to help.

 

For fifty-five years, the Fossey Fund has been dedicated to supporting and safeguarding the populations of wild gorillas as well as the people who coexist in the same forest as them. After setting up two tents in the woods in 1967, Dian Fossey’s legacy lives on. Over the years, we have grown from one employee to a staff of over 300. Our previous home was a rented space far from the gorilla habitat and nearby towns, with only one classroom and a kitchen converted into a laboratory.

Building the facility served primarily as a means of providing space for the organization’s growing workforce and workload. The Fossey Fund founders made a calculated decision to move forward with a 20-year dream to construct a purpose-built center in Rwanda to expedite scientific and conservation efforts while on Rwanda Tours, coinciding with their 50th anniversary celebration in 2018.

Within months following this decision, the Fossey Fund received a major donation from international celebrity Ellen DeGeneres and her spouse, Portia de Rossi. Subsequently, several donors, both big and little, have contributed to the project’s funding in order to construct a state-of-the-art research and education center, which serves as the Fossey Funds’ first permanent residence in Rwanda. The Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund is scheduled to open in February 2022.

About the Campus of Ellen DeGeneres.

Surrounded by Volcanoes National Park, the multi-acre environmentally friendly complex has three main buildings: the Rob and Melani Walton Education Center, the Sandy and Harold Price Research Center, and the Cindy Broder Conservation Gallery. It also has housing for visiting researchers and students.

The building embodies the Fossey Fund’s mission to preserve and lessen its impact on the environment by restoring former agricultural land, collecting rainwater, installing green roofs, and creating a wetland to improve biodiversity and treat wastewater. There were 2,400 new jobs in construction provided by the project, which brought in $15 million for the Rwandan economy.

For the many stakeholders we work with, the Ellen Campus will act as a gateway to conservation, supporting the training of the future generation of environmentalists.

At the Fossey Fund, science is at the heart of all we do. Modern facilities like the Sandy and Harold Price Research Center are devoted to advancing our understanding of physiology, genetics, and palaeontology. The five-fold increase in lab capacity will mean more possibilities for teaching young African conservationists and more ways to collaborate with students and scientific colleagues.

The institute can now expand and transform its programs to study gorillas and important forest habitat, as well as offer educational opportunities to early career African scientists and members of the local community through the Ellen Campus, which represents a significant increase in teaching and laboratory space—Budget Gorilla Trekking.

Education is essential to the mission of Ellen Campus. The institute will be able to host conferences, seminars, and trainings in addition to improving teaching opportunities with local and foreign colleges thanks to expanded classroom space, a science library, and a computer lab. But there are more learning possibilities than just in the classroom; in fact, Ellen Campus as a whole will be a teaching tool. Field trips will be made interesting by the more than 250,000 native plants that make up the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo Interpretive Trails, for instance.

Rwandan Gorilla Trekking
An interactive public display at the Cindy Broder Conservation Gallery also depicts the story of mountain gorilla research and conservation from Dian’s day to the present. It offers breathtaking visual experiences like virtual and augmented reality and a 360-degree immersive theater, never-before-seen artifacts from Dian Fossey’s nearly two decades with the gorillas, and a ton of interesting edutainment opportunities to learn more about the people and science behind the success of mountain gorilla conservation.

In conclusion, guests visiting the Ellen Campus have the option to donate to the Dian Fossey Fund in order to help fund their efforts to conserve the critically endangered mountain gorillas in Volcanoes National Park.