More than 50 Disney Africa employees spent a day in September at the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Conservation Campus in Midrand, South Africa, clearing invasive alien plants from the ground below the car park and then sitting down to a workshop with a title most conservation organizations would not dare use: Rebrand the Bad Guy: Can We Change the Story about Vultures?
The Endangered Wildlife Trust’s account of the day is modest about the gardening and rather more interested in what happened after lunch.
What did the volunteers actually do?
The group came through the company’s VoluntEARS program, the employee volunteering scheme under which Disney Africa staff give time and professional skills to local community projects. They were joined by staff from the organization’s headquarters.
Before any of them picked up a spade, they were given the background: how the Endangered Wildlife Trust started with a single species, the cheetah, and what it does now across habitats, threatened species and the communities living alongside them. Then came a safety briefing, gloves, spades and pruners from the campus management team, and a morning of alien species removal in the area beside the wetland. Lunch was a braai.
Why the vulture workshop is the interesting part
The afternoon session dealt with the ecological role vultures play and the threats they face, and then handed the problem to the room. Working in groups, the Disney teams developed and pitched creative concepts aimed at changing how vultures are portrayed and perceived. The ideas were judged and a winning team picked.
That is an unusual thing to ask of a corporate volunteer day, and it is pointed at a real problem. Vulture declines across Africa are driven in large part by poisoning, and poisoning is a behavior shaped by what people believe about the birds. An organization that spends its field budget on rescuing poisoned and grounded vultures in Limpopo has an obvious interest in the upstream half of that problem, and a room full of people who make and market stories for a living is a reasonable place to go looking for help with it.
Is this Disney’s zoo funding African conservation?
No, and the distinction matters enough to spell out, because the easy version of this story would quietly attach one of the most prominent zoological hubs on this site to a story it has no part in.
The people who turned up at Midrand were Disney Africa employees doing community service through a corporate volunteering program. They were not staff of Disney’s zoological operation, no animals in any collection were involved, and the Endangered Wildlife Trust names no zoo as a funder of this day.
There is, separately, a real funding link between the company and this organization, and it is worth reporting accurately. The Disney Conservation Fund’s 2022 funded projects list, which we opened and read, records a two-year grant running from 2022 to 2024 to the Endangered Wildlife Trust for a project titled Conserving South Africa’s Threatened Butterflies, working with landowners, conservation partners and local communities to protect habitat for six threatened butterfly species in the Western Cape, among them the Bearded Skolly, Dickson’s Skolly, Kaplan’s Skolly and Strutt’s Skolly. Disney’s conservation pages indicate a more recent funded projects list exists; we could not retrieve the file, so we are making no claim about what the fund supports today.
So the honest summary is this. A Disney grant program has funded Endangered Wildlife Trust conservation work, on butterflies, in a different province, finishing two years ago. A Disney corporate volunteering program supplied the labor and the ideas in September. Neither of those is a zoo, and this story carries no facility hub as a result.
What happens next
The organization says a Disney Cape Town community service day is planned for later this year, and that it is looking forward to it. Whether any of the pitched vulture concepts gets made is not something either side has said.
Fifty people pulling invasive plants out of a slope in Midrand will not move a vulture population. Fifty people from the storytelling business spending an afternoon on why vultures are cast as villains might eventually do more than the spades did.
Quick answers
- What did the Disney volunteers do?
More than 50 Disney Africa employees cleared invasive alien plants beside the wetland at the Endangered Wildlife Trust Conservation Campus in Midrand, then took part in a workshop on changing how vultures are portrayed and perceived.
- What was the vulture workshop?
A session titled Rebrand the Bad Guy: Can We Change the Story about Vultures. Teams developed and pitched creative concepts aimed at shifting public perception of vultures, and a winning team was selected.
- Is this Disney zoo funding African conservation?
No. The volunteers came through the Disney VoluntEARS corporate employee volunteering program, not from any zoological operation, no animals in a collection were involved, and the Endangered Wildlife Trust names no zoo as a funder of the day.
- Has the Disney Conservation Fund ever funded the Endangered Wildlife Trust?
Yes. The fund’s 2022 funded projects list records a two-year grant running from 2022 to 2024 for Conserving South Africa’s Threatened Butterflies, protecting habitat for six threatened butterfly species in the Western Cape. We could not retrieve a more recent list, so we make no claim about current funding.
- Why does this story carry no facility hub?
Because no zoological facility is named in it as funder, partner, program leader or holder of the animals. A corporate volunteering program and a grant fund are not a zoo, and attaching one would be an assertion the story does not support.
