Review the state of the foundation as printed in our semi annual RamPage Magazine.
As I sit down to write this message, I find myself thinking less about where the Wyoming Wild Sheep Foundation has been and more about where we’re headed. We’ve built something strong here — but strong organizations don’t coast, they keep building. Over the next two to five years, I want to share where I believe our focus needs to be, and more importantly, how you can be part of it.
Growing Our Membership
Everything we do starts with our members. Continued growth of our membership base isn’t just a numbers goal — it’s how we build the volunteer energy, the donor base, and the political and social capital
that lets us punch above our weight on behalf of wild sheep. We need to keep asking people to join us, and just as importantly, keep giving them reasons to stay. That growth also has to include reaching beyond our traditional base. Younger hunters and conservationists are out there, and so are young and middle-aged adults who haven’t found their way to organizations like ours yet, often simply because we haven’t reached them through the channels they actually use. You can help here more than you might think: bring a friend, a coworker, or your adult kids to a banquet or a work weekend. Tag the chapter in your hunting or hiking photos on social media. If you know a younger hunter who’s serious about conservation but hasn’t joined yet, a personal invitation from someone they trust does more than any ad we could run.
Now, Later, and Always
I think about our financial foundation in three timeframes, and I’d encourage our members to think about it the same way. Now is our general fund — the working capital that keeps the lights on and lets us respond to opportunities as they come up. Your annual membership dues, banquet ticket, and raffle purchases all feed this
fund directly, so simply renewing each year and coming to our events matters more than people realize.
Later is our Life Member and Conservation funds. These are the funds that carry our commitments forward a few years out, and growing them needs to be a deliberate priority, not an afterthought. If you’ve been a member for a while and haven’t considered upgrading to a Life Membership, or making a designated gift to the Conservation
Fund, this is a great time to think about it.
Always is our endowment fund. This is the one I want to spend real energy on over the next several years, because it’s the piece that outlasts all of us. An endowment is how this chapter is still funding habitat work, still supporting research, and still putting sheep on the mountain fifty years from now, long after today’s board has handed off the reins. Building it takes patience and intention, but there’s no more important long-term goal on our list.
There are more ways to contribute to the endowment than people often realize, and I’d encourage everyone to think about what might fit their own situation. That could mean a one-time donation, proceeds from a real estate sale, including the chapter in a will or estate plan, a gift through a donor-advised fund, or other options like appreciated stock, IRA charitable distributions, or naming the chapter as a beneficiary on a life insurance policy or retirement account. If any of these fit your circumstances, reach out to a board member — we’d welcome the conversation.
Meeting People Where They Are
We need a wider reach — online, in print, and in person. You can help extend that reach without much effort at all: follow and share our posts, tag us when you’re out doing chapter work or hunting a Wyoming unit, and pass along our magazine to a friend who might be interested in joining. If you prefer print, let us know your feedback on the magazine so we can keep making it worth your time. And nothing replaces showing up — banquets, chapter events, work weekends, and just being present in our communities. If you haven’t been to an event
in a while, this is your invitation to come back.
Stronger Partnerships
None of our conservation work happens in isolation. Over the coming years, we’re committed to strengthening and deepening our relationships with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, our tribal partners, and other conservation organizations working alongside us on this landscape, as well as with the Wild Sheep Foundation at the national level and our fellow chapters and affiliates across the range. If you have a professional or personal connection to any of these agencies or organizations, or experience working alongside them, we’d love to hear from you — those relationships are often built one
introduction at a time. We also need to strengthen our presence with our elected officials. The decisions that shape wildlife management and habitat conservation in this state are made in large part by people we can and
should be talking to directly. If you know your state legislator or a member of our congressional delegation, or you’re comfortable showing up to a town hall or writing a letter when an issue matters to wild sheep, that kind of grassroots engagement is exactly what strengthens our voice.
Showing What We’re Accomplishing
We do remarkable work — habitat projects, disease research, transplants, youth programs — and we need to get better at showing it to the people who support us and the people who could. If you’ve been part of a habitat project, a transplant, or a youth event, send us your photos and a few lines about your experience. Member stories are often more compelling than anything we could write ourselves, and they help others see exactly what their support makes possible.
Honoring Where We Came From
As we push forward, we can’t afford to lose sight of how we got here. This chapter was built by people, and a lot of that history lives only in memory right now. I’d like to see us put real effort into building out our archives — collecting stories, biographies, and photos from our past board members and our long-standing members before those details fade. If you’ve been around this chapter a long time, or you knew someone who was, consider sitting down for an interview, writing up a memory, or digging through old photo albums for us to scan. It’s easy to let this slide in favor of what’s urgent today, but once that history is gone, it’s gone for good. Preserving it is part of how we honor the people who built this chapter, and it gives our newer members something to connect to.
Investing in Our People
Finally, none of this works without engaged members and a board ready to carry it forward. There are more ways to get involved than serving on the board — committee work, helping run an event, mentoring a younger member, or simply showing up consistently are all valuable. And if leadership is something you’ve thought about,
don’t wait to be asked. Talk to a current board member about what it involves. We need to be intentional about succession planning, identifying and developing the next generation of leaders now, so the transitions ahead are smooth and this organization never misses a step — and that starts with members like you raising your hand.
None of these goals happen overnight, and none of them happen without all of you. Thank you for being part of this chapter, and for everything you do for wild sheep in Wyoming.
Bralli Clifford – President, Wyoming Wild Sheep Foundation
The Only Way To Save Them Is To Take Action Today!
