New donor collaboratives are experimenting, but few national foundations bring big dollars or a strategy.
Published by The Chronicle of Philanthropy
In an old ranch house that serves as the headquarters of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, Jason Baldes greets federal officials and others with doughnuts and coffee. It is his second stop of the day: Early that morning, he drove out to the herd just west of Morton, Wyo., to feed formula to a 3-month-old bison calf whose mother had died.
Baldes, the charity’s executive director and a member of the Eastern Shoshone tribe, has been working to bring back bison since 2006. His goal is to reacquire thousands of acres of private lands within the reservation that were sold long ago so that bison can roam a huge area and be managed as wildlife. He wants his people and the Northern Arapaho tribe with whom they share this land to be able to hunt bison and harvest a traditional and healthier food source than the cattle that predominate on these sagebrush plains. He also hopes to attract tourists driving to Yellowstone and bolster the reservation’s struggling economy.
Hand-feeding the calf didn’t exactly fit the wildlife narrative. But when a film crew from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom zeroed in on a previous calf feeding a few weeks earlier, Baldes didn’t object.
“Once they found him, he stole the show,” Baldes tells the group of visitors. “If he can raise money to buy land back for us, that’s a pretty good way to have him kick in his fair share.”
In August, Baldes learned that the charity he founded less than two years ago would receive its largest grant yet, $9.8 million from the federal Economic Development Administration, to build a new museum and headquarters here.