For a quarter of a century, we’ve been dedicated to protecting and restoring some of the most biodiverse rainforests on Earth. Along the way, we’ve been fortunate to work with partners who share our vision of a future where wildlife and communities thrive together.
Meet Orangutan Outreach
Among these partners, Orangutan Outreach has stood out as a steadfast ally, one whose commitment, compassion, and long-term support have helped shape what our conservation efforts look like today.
A U.S. based charity established by Richard Zimmerman in 2007, our partnership with Orangutan Outreach began in 2013. Since then, they have contributed over $200,000 to support our projects, from research and monitoring to firefighting and habitat restoration.
A shared vision
Our collaboration with Orangutan Outreach stems from a shared understanding: saving orangutans means protecting their forest home. It requires science-based conservation, community empowerment, habitat restoration, and long-term investment in local capacity.
From the beginning, Orangutan Outreach recognized the importance of holistic, landscape-scale conservation. Their support enabled us to expand programmes that safeguard wild orangutan populations, while also addressing the complex challenges faced by the human communities living alongside them.
Supporting science
Rigorous field research is at the heart of our work. Orangutan Outreach’s support has helped us:
- Conduct long-term monitoring of wild orangutan populations.
- Facilitate one of the world’s longest-running studies of orangutan behavioural ecology, collecting thousands of hours of observational data to reveal new insights and identify behavioural changes in response to environmental threats.
- Launch a new flagship orangutan health project, allowing us to establish a baseline for population health, monitor at-risk individuals and mitigate the spread of disease.
- Make extensive renovations to our field camp, including boardwalk transects into the forest, which are vital to the safety of our teams and their ability to carry out world-leading rainforest research.
- Train local community members and students through hands-on conservation science, shaping a new generation of leaders, researchers and environmental policymakers.
These activities deepen our global understanding of orangutan ecology, directly informing species protection plans.
From research to reforestation
With support from Orangutan Outreach, we’ve been able to plant hundreds of thousands of native trees across burned and degraded peatlands—each seedling a step toward restoring the forest and safeguarding the orangutans that rely on it.
Our philosophy is that conservation succeeds when local people have a genuine stake in its success. This partnership has strengthened that approach, enabling us to expand community-managed seedling nurseries and support wider community development initiatives, including sustainable livelihoods and environmental education.
Peatland fires remain one of the most serious threats to orangutans and biodiversity. Without effective prevention, even newly restored areas are at risk of burning again. Thanks to this funding, we have strengthened our fire mitigation work: training and equipping community firefighting teams, running fire-awareness campaigns, and conducting year-round patrols in high-risk zones.
Not just what they’re protecting, but who
Orangutan Outreach understands that a species is made up of individuals. This is particularly true of orangutans, one of our closest animal relatives and Asia’s only great ape. The orangutans we study all have names and distinct personalities, each with their own story to tell.
To help fund our projects, Orangutan Outreach offer their supporters the chance to adopt Gracia and the ‘G Family’, a family of orangutans who’ve been followed by our teams for over 20 years now. Since 2013, nearly 100 Orangutan Outreach supporters have provided donations in the name of “Gracia and the kids”, totalling around $40,000. These funds contribute directly to the protection and restoration of critical orangutan habitat, something that is especially pertinent in Gracia’s case, as her original home range was partially destroyed by wildfires in 2015 and has since been replanted. Since our partnership with Orangutan Outreach began, Gracia has become a grandmother twice over and even welcomed two more offspring of her own (her fourth and fifth, respectively!)
Every baby orangutan is a powerful symbol of hope for this Critically Endangered species, and testament to the success of our conservation work. These successes are only possible with the generous support of partners like Orangutan Outreach, who are dedicated to creating a future where Borneo’s orangutans don’t just survive, but thrive.
Looking to the future
The partnership between BNF and Orangutan Outreach has always extended far beyond financial support. It is a genuine collaboration built on trust, shared purpose, and long-term commitment. Orangutan Outreach has acted not only as a funder, but as a sounding board for new ideas, a critical friend when constructive challenge was needed, and a reliable ally in navigating complex funding landscapes. Their involvement has included reviewing proposals, identifying one-off funding opportunities, and offering strategic guidance that has helped shape the partnerships’s direction and ambition.
At a time when conservation challenges are intensifying and resources are increasingly stretched; it has never been more important to collaborate closely and lean on long-standing partners who understand the work deeply. Orangutan Outreach remains one of those valued allies.
As this partnership continues to evolve, there is significant potential to deepen collaboration even further: strengthening long-term restoration planning, expanding community-led conservation initiatives, and advancing the evidence base for orangutan health and habitat recovery. With Orangutan Outreach’s continued engagement, the impact delivered to orangutans, forests, and communities across Central Kalimantan will only continue to grow.
