Funny Faith - Sept 30, 2011Facebook crises made this mainly an office day, so we have little to report about the bears.
We’re wondering what to do. We may have made some mistakes.
We recently unbanned nearly everyone and asked mods to be more permissive about comments and to make banning a last resort to be done through an objective procedure involving a separate committee. We are moving toward a team approach for managing Lily’s page. To do that, we enlisted a professional with 33 years experience in marketing and customer satisfaction and long experience managing Facebook pages. We are developing new guidelines for both mods and Lily fans and getting professional training for mods.
But we started at a bad time when emotions are running high and mods are in short supply. We are doing our best to find and train new mods. A problem is that we haven’t given clear guidance to the existing mods, leaving them to do the best they could. In time, with new written guidelines for mods and fans, things will become consistent.
We thought the changes would be welcome, and they may yet be when they are fully implemented. But for now, angry people are trying to destroy the research and Lily’s page, making us doubly thankful for the many supporters who are there for the bears and want nothing but the best for the bears and the research.
Today, someone attempted to delete Lily’s page and someone deleted ‘Hope’s Big Adventure’ that many of you had written chapters for. Fortunately, a Lily fan had saved the Adventure just prior to someone deleting it, and we were able to repost it.
We erred in saying that Team Bear has disbanded. We were told they were suspending their activities but thought they were disbanding when they took down their Team Bear page. They have now told us that suspending is a better word. We agree. This is a good time to suspend fundraising while people are stricken with grief over Hope.
We see a lot of erroneous information posted about Lynn and Donna Rogers and Sue.
Here are some facts. All money donated to the Bear Center has gone entirely for debt reduction, and all money donated to the WRI has gone entirely for operations and a “Legacy Fund” to facilitate data analysis and publishing into the future. Hopefully, Lynn will last awhile to continue the research, write books, complete scientific publications, complete the North American Bear Center, and get education programs and other programs for bears firmly in place.
The WRI pays Lynn and Sue each $30,000 per year. They receive no health or retirement benefits. They usually work over 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Government biologists are paid 2 to 5 times what Lynn and Sue make, and the government biologists work only a 40-hour week and receive benefits. Lynn and Sue work as volunteers for the North American Bear Center where they create exhibits and Lynn provides overall direction.
Lynn and Donna live in a house in Ely that was built in 1915 and that they bought in 1983 for $34,000. Lynn and Sue work at the Research Center which Lynn and Donna bought and paid for in 1993 with insurance settlement money they received after Donna was permanently injured by a drunk driver. Lynn, Donna, and Sue have not taken a vacation in many years beyond visiting relatives and attending conferences. Bear research and education are their way of life.
To help create the North American Bear Center, Lynn and Donna mortgaged their property to provide an unsecured start-up loan to the Bear Center. If the Bear Center failed, Lynn and Donna had no way to recover their loan and escape bankruptcy. Your unexpected donations were critical in reducing the loan, as you know.
Most of the above is available in the publicly available IRS Form 990’s. We can only guess the motives of the people who have been spreading false information. As we said, we are doubly grateful to the stalwarts who want to learn and want to see the research and education continue.
Video from our walk with Lily and Faith is posted athttp://www.youtube.com/user/bearstudy#p/u/0/jSoQHiRYEMc.
Thank you for all you do.
—Lynn Rogers and Sue Mansfield, Biologists, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center