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One
of our early steps in designing an effective education program was
to create a modest web site. Over and above providing access to
a broad spectrum of tiger knowledge, our goal has been to inform
the public about who we are, to document our activities, to communicate
our objectives, and to deliver an urgent message that tigers need
our help if they are to survive in the wild. During our first four
years on-line, we have had over three hundred visitors, many of
whom have made direct contact with us and provided us with encouragement,
offers of help and generous financial support. In view of this extraordinary
response, we decided to update and expand this web site. This has
been a lengthy project that has consumed thousands of hours on the
part of a large all-volunteer team. It is still under construction
and will hopefully be subject to constant updates and improvements.
We expect that this web site will be one of our most effective means
of communication and, as such, will attract ongoing global support
for our work. We encourage you to visit often in order to keep abreast
of tiger news, to communicate with others who care about tigers
and to follow our progress. We hope it will also inspire you to
act and to help us prevent the extinction of wild tigers.
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1998
was the Year of the Tiger for most people in the Orient. Canada
is a country rich with hundreds of thousands of recently arrived
Oriental immigrants, most of whom maintain strong traditional beliefs.
During this year, The Tiger Foundation reached out to this important
community and shared with them a positive tiger conservation message;
one whose values transcended into their daily lives in North America.
We were the subject of two feature stories in Chinese language dailies,
and one in a Japanese newspaper. We were also invited to display
our educational exhibit at the Vancouver Chinese New Year's Festival
and as well as Vancouver's very popular Dragon Boat Festival. This
was a particularly satisfying initiative, because we were able to
reach thousands of new Canadian immigrants, many of whom are only
beginning to get acquainted with North American conservation values.
Utilizing the tiger as a symbol, we will endeavor to build bridges
between Asian and North American cultures.
One
of our principal educational objectives is to transform our maiden
Canadian Education Program into a much farther-reaching project.
In 2000, we initiated the creation a wide variety of educational
materials that will be available on-line, free of charge, through
this Web site. In time, we expect that this program will have an
international and even multi-lingual scope. 