MEDIA RELEASE

11/25/2024

–For Immediate Release—

Contact: Louis Medina, Outreach Director, Sierra Forever (formerly Eastern Sierra Interpretive Association), [email protected], Cell 323.788.7447

Giving Tuesday, Dec. 3, Provides Additional Opportunity for Sierra Forever to Fundraise Through the EarthGives.org Platform

Bishop-based Sierra Forever (formerly Eastern Sierra Interpretive Association) is, like many other nonprofits, asking the community to consider donating to it on Giving Tuesday, Dec. 3rd, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, a date set aside as a worldwide day of charitable giving, happening primarily online.

What is different about Sierra Forever’s Giving Tuesday efforts this year is that it is using the EarthGives.org platform to fundraise. “Earth Gives,” through which Sierra Forever raised close to $1,600 earlier this fall, “is proud to be part of the Giving Tuesday family,” said Earth Gives Founder and Executive Director Rhonda Bannard. The Phoenix-based nonprofit is the only fundraising platform solely dedicated to supporting nonprofit organizations focused on conservation and environmental education and protection.

Bannard said environmental or conservation-focused philanthropy currently represents only 2 percent of all charitable giving; but because individual donors make up 64 percent of all contributions to charity, Earth Gives has the potential to harness donors’ giving power and “expand the impact” on earth-centered philanthropy.

As an Earth Gives participant, Sierra Forever is entitled to use EarthGives.org for its year-end fundraising efforts, including Giving Tuesday. “Your campaign doesn’t have to stop on December 3rd,” Bannard told participants in a recent email. “Funds can be raised through the end of the year.”

“And you don’t even have to wait for Giving Tuesday to get here,” said Sierra Forever Outreach Director Louis Medina. “You can give now!”

Pressing Needs

“We are currently highlighting the needs of one of our collaborative conservation efforts, the Bi-State Sage-Grouse partnership,” Medina said.

The Bi-State partnership involves a multi-jurisdictional group of diverse stakeholders whose work has been guided by a series of Bi-State Sage-Grouse Action Plans dating back to 2004. Primary goals of these action plans are to maintain and improve sagebrush and associated habitats in the California-Nevada Bi-State area for the greater sage-grouse and other species; and to ensure there is no net loss of greater sage-grouse breeding populations in the Bi-State area. More information about this effort can be found at www.sierraforever.org/bistatesagegrouse.

In talking to partnering wildlife biologists, Tracy Misiewicz, Sierra Forever’s Bi-State Sage Grouse Communication & Data Coordinator, said they identified “two things that they are always looking for funding for: 1) Very high-magnification spotting scopes that can enable them to spot birds from up to 800 yards away (one of these was instrumental in discovering a new breeding ground last year); and 2) Small GPS units that we use to collar and track sage-grouse to better understand what habitat they are using and how they are using it.”

Such equipment is not cheap: “High-quality scopes cost between $4,000 and $5,000 each, and GPS trackers for the birds cost approximately $2,000 each,” Misiewicz said.

“No donation is too small,” Medina said, “and besides these program-specific needs, there are always general operating costs related to Sierra Forever’s many educational programs, like our interpretive hikes and SnowSchool for kids, that can be offset by charitable giving. Crowd funding through an online giving day like Giving Tuesday can greatly multiply giving and make nonprofit dreams come true.”

How to Give

Simply go to www.earthgives.org/organization/SierraForever to donate.

You can also click on the “Create a Fundraiser” button. This is something similar to the widely popular birthday fundraisers people create on social media, Medina said. “You get a unique url for your fundraiser that you can then share with others to make it easy for them to give to a cause you care about. It’s a form of so-called ‘peer-to-peer fundraising,’ meaning you reach out to your network of friends and family, and they are more likely to give to a cause because you asked them to.”

For additional information about Sierra Forever’s Giving Tuesday and year-end fundraising through Earth Gives, including the possibility of donating by check, if you prefer that to online giving, please write to [email protected] or call 760-872-1220 between 8 am and 5 pm Mon-Fri.

About Sierra Forever

Founded in 1970 as Eastern Sierra Interpretive Association (ESIA), Sierra Forever is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation that partners with local, tribal, and federal governments and fellow nonprofits to provide interpretive education about the Sierra Nevada and Great Basin landscapes, in the hope of inspiring members of the public to develop a deeper appreciation for public lands, and thereby become better stewards. Sierra Forever operates bookstores in visitor centers in collaboration with agency partners that include the Inyo, Humboldt-Toiyabe, Tahoe, and Klamath National Forests, Death Valley National Park, Devils Postpile National Monument, Manzanar National Historic Site, and the Bureau of Land Management’s Bishop Field Office. Sierra Forever also hosts the Eastern Sierra History Conference annually each fall. For more information, please visit sierraforever.org.
                                                                                                           

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