Dobro Mail.ru is a fundraising platform that raises funds to help people in difficult situations and animals. This year, Dobro Mail.ru have added a new section dedicated to the protection of nature to the platform. In this section funds are being raised for environmental projects. The collection of Lake Baikal Foundation «Let’s Keep Baikal Clean!» has become one of the projects of the new section.
The fundraising campaign «Let’s Keep Baikal Clean!» is aimed at supporting the Trash Free National Parks program. The project of the same name in the Zabaikalsky National Park (Republic of Buryatia) has been implemented for the third year in a row. It is based on the creation and maintenance of infrastructure for separate waste collection in the park, as well as active eco-educational work performed by volunteers.
The project «Let’s Keep Baikal Clean!» does not involve shore cleaning, instead, we strive to create conditions under which visitors to the national park would not have the desire to leave garbage after visiting it, and motivate them to useful actions like putting recyclables for recycling directly during a tourist holiday. Thanks to the joint work with the curators of the Dobro Mail.ru , we managed to develop a communication strategy with the audience and successfully closed the collection for our project «Let’s Keep Baikal Clean!». We were supported by 126 people. We have collected 100,000 rubles. This amount is fully transferred to provide volunteers with food during the summer season.
In total, during the summer of 2021, 11 volunteer shifts were held in the Zabaikasky National Park within the framework of the Trash Free National Parks program, in which more than 100 volunteers took part. All volunteers were trained on the topic of responsible waste management in national parks and told visitors about the importance of separate garbage collection, about the possibilities and features of waste disposal for recycling. The administrators of the national park campsites worked together with them on these tasks.
Now we are starting to summarize the results of this year and set new tasks. We are calculating the amount of secondary raw materials, which the national park will take to the reception point in the city of Ulan-Ude. The Foundation will assess the fundamental changes that have been achieved over the 3 years of the project. This year, the Trash Free National Parks program was replicated in the second natural territory – the national park «Chikoy» (Zabaikalsky region). On the territory of the third protected area, the Baikal National Park (Irkutsk Region), it is planned to open separate collection points also by the end of 2021.
Lake Baikal Foundation expresses its gratitude to the supporters of the Foundation who supported the collection of fonds on the Dobro Mail.ru platform, curators of the platform, volunteers, administration and employees of the Zabaikalsky National Park!