About me
Wally Van Sickle III
Wally Van Sickle’s lifelong passion for wildlife conservation, research and travel led him to pursue volunteer conservation work in Kenya, Belize, and Australia in addition to his field work as a mountain lion researcher in the U.S. After experiencing firsthand the contrast between poorly and well-equipped projects, it was evident that there was no shortage of passionate biologists, but a significant need for proper equipment. Wally was inspired to ensure that dedicated biologists all over the world had the simple tools they needed to do effective conservation work.
In 1991, Wally founded IDEA WILD, a non-profit that works to minimize biodiversity loss by empowering people on the front lines of conservation through small equipment grants. Wally started by sending out letters asking people he knew to help him provide equipment for the “Heroes and Sheroes of the Planet”. Two weeks later, the first US$10 check arrived in the mail! That first year, Wally bought equipment for 11 biologists in Guatemala and Mexico and used his own limited resources to continue to travel to biodiverse countries. He met conservation biologists at universities and NGOs and gave presentations about how IDEA WILD could help them by providing equipment.
Soon, many requests for much needed equipment were arriving by mail. Within the first seven years, Wally logged hundreds of hours of bus travel and spoke in 15 Latin American countries. More recently, Wally expanded his dynamic grassroots efforts to Southeast Asia, Philippines, Madagascar, Africa, and the Caribbean.
Today, Wally donates equipment to over 45 conservation biologists each month. An ever-expanding network of biologists now rely on Wally for their binoculars, GPS, digital cameras, laptops, LCD projectors, telemetry, camping gear, etc. Now, over 8880 projects in 147 countries have used equipment provided by Wally to conduct their conservation projects.
