25th Anniversary

Enjoy a slideshow of this year’s activities in the Bonobo Peace Forest!

On June 16, 1998, twenty-five years ago, Alison Mize and I co-founded the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, together with our founding board members, Bill Meade, Ted Green, and Steve Hamblin. We reached out to an amazing group of dedicated and talented people from a range of disciplines to take a creative look at how we could best preserve the bonobo species and its rainforest habitat in the Congo Basin.

In June of 1998, Sally Jewell Coxe launched the Bonobo Conservation Initiative along with Alison Mize and a small group of bonobo enthusiasts. Twenty five years later, what started as a brainstorming session in a living room in Washington, DC has grown to nine million acres of protected land in the DRC. Together with our Congolese partners, we have established the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve and the Sankuru Nature Reserve, home to bonobos and a vast array of other wildlife. And all of this incredible progress is thanks to you!