In light of the COVID-19, we are all very aware at this point of the seriousness that this pandemic is bringing upon us, there are many hardships at this time and we at Kindred Spirit Elephant Sanctuary are no exception. We are struggling, and I don’t use that term lightly. We have had our struggles in the past, but this is something new altogether and something that is out of everyone’s control.

These last few weeks we have been getting cancellations left, right and center and have been getting little to no bookings, putting us in a very hard position funding-wise, we have had staff that have had to make the hard decision to leave early and are constantly answering emails about the situation. Now, with the growing concern from our local communities about the spread of the virus, I have had to come to the very difficult decision to cancel our visitor and volunteer program until the end of April, after that we will reassess the situation.

Although this is the best decision to keep our community and staff free from any risk, this obviously is also going to be a huge drain on us as we are only able to survive and continue our work due to our visitor and volunteer program. Throughout this time, we will still need to provide for our elephants and our running costs and with no income coming in, this is a huge strain on all of us.

I’m sure some of you are already aware (although the numbers aren’t confirmed) that there have been many closures of elephant projects in Thailand because of the impact of this virus. This is very bad news for the elephants as there are little options left for them to go. We don’t want KSES to become one of these and we need to keep fighting to prevent this happening and to ensure we can continue to provide for all of our elephants.

So this is me, shouting out for help at this time. Our fundraising in the past has usually amounted to very little. As a small organisation, we simply don’t get the support that we need and fundraising for something small or something in particular has been the only way that we have been able to make an impact with it, we have never been able to gain enough funds through fundraisers to cover all our elephant and running costs. But now we will have to try.

I have set-up this separate fundraiser page for this particular situation. We are already running our fundraiser page for Dodo, and I hope that we can continue to run these two fundraisers together. We hope to raise some extra funds to cover our costs during this time. Our monthly running costs can be up to 350,000THB/$11,000USD/£9000GBP per month. We are hoping to raise 400,000THB to help us cover the costs of March and April.

As mentioned, we usually get very little support through our fundraisers, so if anyone is in a position to run their own fundraiser, has any contacts with newspapers or has any other ideas of how we can raise these much needed funds at this time, then please do get in touch. 

Thank you all and stay safe everyone!