Michael Stillman, President of Fourth Wall Restaurants, owns and operates high standing restaurants in New York City, including Quality Meats. Dennis Rentsch is Project Leader of the FZS Community Outreach Programme in the Serengeti Ecosystem, Tanzania. Living in two opposite universes and working in very different fields, who would have thought that these two would end up collaborating together? But this is what you could call the magic of friendship. Friends since childhood, Dennis and Michael developed a deep respect for each other’s work – even...

2010 began with a new hope for five villages in Serenget: Rwamchanga, Bisarara, Nyamburi, Park Nyigoti and Nyichoka. A training of trainers was conducted in January to February including 12 participants from the five villages. The selection of the villages was based on the fact that some villagers were totally depending on poaching as their main income generating activity, venturing into protected areas to snare wildlife which was sold locally as a main source of food. Both men and women from these villages seemed to participate in this illegal activity either directly...

December 14th, 2009
Earlier today the SEMP team paid a visit to Bonchugu, a village with a historically high number of illegal bushmeat hunters, and one which FZS has been working with for the past year. In that time, many bushmeat hunters have become members of a Community Conservation Bank, and learned to become business entrepreneurs, and most importantly, ex-poachers.
Our visit to Bonchugu today was for the purpose of fulfilling a request to our office from a group of self-organized footballers and self-admitted illegal hunters. In response to this...