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While growing up in a rural Illinois town north of
Chicago, Charlie Knowles had as many as 30 pets he cared
for around his family's sprawling acreage that included
dogs, cats, gerbils, hamsters, rabbits, lizards, and
a variety of fish.
Little wonder that his childhood icon was Jane Goodall,
whose pioneering work in East Africa with chimpanzees
in the 1960s set breakthrough standards for both primate
protection and studies of animal behavior in the wild.
"I wanted to be Jane Goodall," says Knowles,
who made a fortune in industrial software, but now pursues
his passion for helping animals fulltime as co-founder,
executive director, and guru of the Los Altos-based
Wildlife Conservation Network-an innovative two-year
old non-profit which serves as a conduit for international
wildlife philanthropy.
"I admired Goodall like so many little kids who
saw the National Geographic video about her and read
articles about how she was stepping forward to save
the animals. She was a real inspiration," he added.
These days, it's the renowned primatologist who praises
the 44-year-old Knowles and lends her voice in support
of the unique approaches he's developed to ease the
burdens of small teams of often isolated animal scientists,
laboring in some of the world's poorest and most remote
regions to protect irreplaceable wildlife.
The network, already operating on a budget close to
$1 million, is working with nine separate projects to
save an array of threatened species that includes elephants
in Kenya, cheetahs in Botswana and Namibia, the Ethiopian
wolf, the Congo's okapi (a shorter-necked cousin of
the giraffe), the Amur leopard of eastern Russia, the
snow leopard of the Himalayas and the Andean mountain
cat, whose habitat stretches across four Latin American
countries.
In October, Goodall was keynote speaker at the network's
2nd annual Wildlife Expo at Foothill College in Los
Altos Hills. The two-day event attracted nearly 1,000
devotees of wildlife causes as well as 20 leading conservationists
and their advocates from a dozen nations, including
actress Isabella Rossellini and best-selling author-zoologist
Iain (cq) Douglas-Hamilton of Kenya-based Save the Elephants.
A primary purpose of the event was to enable the conservationists
to schmooze with potential benefactors, describe their
programs and outline what's needed to keep them going.
"It's a good opportunity to be in direct contact
with them [the conservationists] instead of being so
removed by a bureaucracy that separates us like with
so many foundations,'' explained Rossellini, a longtime
donor to the arts and animal causes who has become a
good friend of Knowles through their shared interest,
and serves on the network's five-member board of directors.
"It also helps guarantee that the money goes to
them," she added. "I've felt that sometimes
when you give to a big foundation you never quite know
where the money goes. This way, I can sit down with
them and ask directly 'Did you receive my $25,000 and
what did you do with it?' "
The amiable Knowles does an entertaining imitation
of Rossellini's accent at every opportunity ("Who
doesn't want to speak Italian?" he jokes). He's
performed it to appreciative audiences at several network
fundraisers she's attended to lend her celebrity status.
The film star, now performing for the first time on
the Broadway stage in Terence McNally's "The Stendhal
Syndrome," good-naturedly accepts the teasing.
But she admits she was a bit embarrassed last year when
Knowles got up at an event in San Francisco and announced
in that tortured Italian accent that he would take auction
bids for a private dinner with Rossellini at her New
York City apartment.
"I told Charlie, 'You're nuts,' that I would be
humiliated-but, you know, we raised $12,000," she
beamed.
Rossellini also made a donation last year that touched
a nostalgic nerve among those who recall the performance
of her late mother, Ingrid Bergman, opposite Humphrey
Bogart in Casablanca, first screened in 1943.
Taking note of the film's 60th anniversary, a Diet
Coke TV commercial was aired that used footage of that
classic last fog-shrouded scene between Bogey and Bergman.
Rossellini received a hefty royalty check which she
immediately gave to the wildlife network. "My mom
would have liked what I did. She loved animals, too."
Meanwhile, more than $250,000 in contributions was
collected at the Foothill College expo, paving the way
for, among other things, possibly expanding on-site
computer networks for the scientists and installing
satellite telephone hookups that can save lives in the
event of an emergency.
"Some of the places our people work are difficult,
dangerous,'' Knowles grimly acknowledged. "We had
three people killed in the field last year, and there
were a total of seven plane crashes."
It was a reminder that airborne accidents are not uncommon
among scientists in Africa who fly in small, propeller-driven
aircraft to hunt for poachers or to track the routes
of elephants, rhinoceros, and other roaming wildlife.
According to Knowles, author Douglas-Hamilton has crashed
four planes over thirty years, most recently in September
when he was attempting to land at a Kenyan jungle strip
and a frightened zebra ran into the propeller, violently
overturning the aircraft and leaving pilot and passenger
hanging upside down from their straps.
The occupants were unhurt, but Save the Elephants is
now without a plane, a predicament the network hopes
to help fix with a new appeal for contributions.
Knowles began his dream-fulfilling journey into what
might be called hands-on philanthropy a decade ago,
after he sold his Mountain View company, Rubicon Technology,
and decided to devote his considerable energy, hi-tech
business acumen, and a sizeable portion of his own wealth
(more than $1 million to date, he calculates) to benefit
newly emerging wildlife conservation non-profits.
First, it was the Cheetah Conservation Fund, which
grew into the largest cat conservation program in the
world through his tutelage and fundraising savvy. And,
more recently, the Sonoma-based Snow Leopard Conservancy,
which now pursues its work in a dozen Asian countries.
His achievements with the two startups drew the attention
of Goodall, who told a national publication three years
ago that groups like hers would benefit immensely "if
there were more people like Charlie Knowles.''
Early in 2002, galvanized by the successes of the cheetah
and snow leopard programs, Knowles and AkikoYamazaki,
a Los Altos neighbor and wife of Jerry Yang, founder
of Yahoo, joined in establishing the new international
wildlife organization.
They had linked up several months before when Knowles,
emboldened by Goodall's flattering remarks, phoned her
institute's office in New Jersey and arranged a reception
at his home for Goodall to meet with several philanthropists
of the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund, including
Yamazaki.
Yamazaki, like Knowles and her husband a Stanford University-trained
engineer, praises Knowles as "a person with great
vision whose hands-on approach as our day-to-day operations
guy and his selfless style impresses other people to
do their best.''
At their very first meeting, Knowles convinced her
that what they were about to embark on would have great
appeal to people of wealth who sought to contribute
where it would have a significant social and economic
impact, as well as an environmental one. "I wanted
to work with an organization that can make a real difference
and I'm already seeing our original vision for WCN happening
right before my eyes," she said.
What Knowles and Yamazaki, who has a background in
hi-tech marketing and is also a major benefactor of
the San Jose Ballet, have done is to take the business
model that launched numerous Silicon Valley startups
in the 1990s and adapt it to the support of what Knowles
calls "conservation entrepreneurs.'' That is, on-the-ground
scientists working on shoestring projects in remote
areas of the planet, places that mainstream philanthropy
has tended to be wary of.
The network plays the role of venture capitalist, partnering
conservationists with donors prepared to invest in projects
that have met the network's criteria for a financial
grant: The requirements call for an applicant group
to be small and independent, target a specific species
for protection, and work in ways that benefit both the
endangered animal and a region's indigenous population.
An example of the latter is the Snow Leopard Conservancy's
provision of mobile corrals to protect communal livestock
from predators in Central Asian mountain settlements,
in the process saving leopards from retaliatory killing
by outraged villagers. In addition, the conservationists
are training local people to take advantage of tourism
with programs that offer lodging and meals in traditional
village homes to Himalayan travelers.
Knowles also likes to tell of a measure taken by Save
the Elephants to inhibit the lumbering pachyderms from
destroying the crops of nearby Kenyan villages and creating
swaths of downed trees in their foraging for food. It
seems the farms are most in danger if the elephants
have uprooted so many trees in an area and stripped
them of foliage that their appetite sends them to the
crops, running the risk of getting shot.
"One solution the Save the Elephant people came
up with was to put beehives in the trees as guards-the
elephants are terrified of bees and it helps prevent
them from knocking down trees,'' said Knowles.
Laura Arrillaga, director of the Arrillaga Family Foundation
and one of the network's most fervent advocates, said
Knowles' vision has spawned a "powerful force for
social change, for economic empowerment and educational
opportunities in the local communities.
"Our foundation invests in this organization because
it has the credible leverage to overcome the myriad
barriers to global social philanthropy in so many exciting
ways," added Arrillaga, co-founder of the Silicon
Valley Social Venture Fund.
A lecturer in strategic philanthropy at Stanford's
Graduate School of Business,'' she said the successes
achieved by the relatively new wildlife organization
already make it a potential candidate as a case study
for business school curricula. Besides fundraising,
the wildlife network-which has a small fulltime staff,
but can call on as many as 50 volunteers-handles marketing,
grant-writing and website management for its clients,
freeing up the scientists to concentrate on their mission
in the field.
Screening of applicants includes a field visit by Knowles
or one of his staff, who all have overseas experience
working with wildlife or other organizations. At least
a few of those trips have taken nearly a week to arrive
at a site because it was located in the upper reaches
of the Himalayas or deep in the rain forest of central
Africa.
Virtually unique in the non-profit arena, the network
passes on 100 per cent of a cash gift to the targeted
program. The network's board of directors, Knowles,
Yamazaki, Rossellini, John
Lucas, director of the White Oak Conservation Center
in Florida, and Christine Hemrick, Cisco Systems vice
president for technology policy, pick up the tab for
administrative and other expenses through their own
$50,000 annual donations.
They figure the network also gets more bang for a donor's
buck because much of a contribution is likely to be
spent in the field, saving money but also benefiting
the local economy.
In Africa, for example, a $50 gift can provide 50 wildlife
education booklets for a village, or pay for anesthesia,
an ID chip, and disease testing for two cheetahs. In
an environment in which bush roads are exceptionally
tough on vehicles, as little as $1,000 buys fuel and
pays for repairs for a small fleet of vehicles for at
least three months.
The network is headquartered in a comfortable three-bedroom
house in the hills above Foothill College that Knowles
purchased for the non-profit and converted into office
space. It's a convenient short walk through a grove
of buckeye trees to and from Knowles' nearby sylvan
estate. A whimsical welcome mat urges network visitors
to "Please Wipe Your Paws.''
Scruffy, a frisky Labrador, shares the workday hours
of the three program managers, Stacey Iverson, Elaine
Iverson (no relation), and Alicia Falsetto, all veteran
volunteers for wildlife organizations. They plan fundraising
and educational events, handle accounting, keep in touch
with the wildlife teams, respond to donors' requests
for information and advice, and occasionally are called
on to set up a visiting conservationist at a computer
workstation or arrange an overnight stay on the reception
area couch.
Each also spends several weeks a year traveling to
habitats where the teams are working. Stacey Iverson,
like Falsetto a former Peace Corps volunteer in West
Africa, was in Ethiopia and Kenya last year checking
out information technology needs of the wolf and elephant
groups.
"It's really important to understand the difficult
conditions they are working under, what their needs
are, and you can only do that by being there with them,"
she says.
"We come back rejuvenated every time we go out
in the field. We are reminded once again just why we
are doing this."
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