What Impact Do We Have? Why Do We Fundraise?

Next month - August 2025 - UKWT celebrates our 5 year anniversary.  SO much has happened over the last 5 years. Here's what we have achieved and then (below that) what your donations fund, to help us to help wildlife, every month...

UKWT has always been a celebration of the fact that we ALL matter, whatever/whoever we are.  UKWT focuses on what we can do to celebrate & boost one another - Wildlife Rescuers, Vet Practices, UKWT Organisers & Drivers - to help wildlife together.  We play our part in filling in the transport gap around the UK, to get wildlife to emergency care.

• WHEN WE STARTED…  I set up UKWT because I noticed that around 1/3rd of wildlife weren't getting to emergency care just due to transport issues. When UKWT first launched in August 2020... We used to coordinate emergency transports for wildlife casualties/orphans (securing rescue spaces and organising Drivers). We transported almost 600 wild lives & provided advice/support for another 2000, up to June 2022.

• JUST AFTER WE STARTED, IN JANUARY 2021, I CAME TO UNDERSTAND JUST HOW UNREGULATED THE UK WILDLIFE RESCUE INDUSTRY WAS… This lack of regulation means that almost anyone can set up as a 'Rescue' (you could do it right now, with kind intentions, setting up a social media account and choosing a name for your Rescue and inviting members of the public to bring you wildlife).  [*Please note that I am NOT advocating this practice. To do the above would be the WORST thing that you could do for our UK wildlife. To truly be of help to poorly/orphaned wildlife you require a significant level of knowledge & training AND you need a strong, working relationship with your local Veterinary Practice (it is not enough to just be a client there).]

Since almost anyone can set up as a 'Rescue’, unfortunately lots of well intentioned people do BUT they often have no training, no suitable premises, they don’t work with a vet (which means no access to the right medications, no access to veterinary diagnostic tools & support like x-rays, blood tests and life saving operations) and they often have little to no knowledge at all of the animals they are taking in or what injuries/illnesses they might be experiencing. 

As a transport network for wildlife, this has led to a lot of extra steps being put in place to ensure that we are always doing our best to take wildlife to places who CAN provide the right care.  [Essentially, it felt the same as creating a transport network of willing Drivers with cars and then realising that there weren’t any proper roads to drive on, to get animals from A-B, so we ended up creating the ‘road map’ ourselves.  I realised that I either closed UKWT - as I didn’t actually have a map to run off - or I & others needed to come together to create that map.]

• HENCE, THE FOUNDING OF THE WILDLIFE CARE BADGE…  The WCB represented the uniting of Veterinary Professionals & Wildlife Rehabbers, to enable the wildlife rescue industry to self regulate itself.  It required a year of development & launched in February 2022.

The WCB is currently the ONLY Wildlife Rescue map/database in the UK that features Wildlife Rescues who have proven standards of care, akin to actual licensing (annual onsite checks, exams on wildlife care passed & high welfare practices proven through record keeping and an ongoing vet relationship, every quarter throughout the year).  Without the WCB Map, UKWT cannot run.  We rely on it to know where to take wildlife to, entirely.

• JUNE 2022 - DECEMBER 2024 WERE EXCEPTIONALLY BUSY YEARS, BEHIND THE SCENES.  THE IMPACT OF THESE EFFORTS CAN BE SEEN TODAY…

• WCB PROGRESS, THEN TO NOW: From the WCB launch in February 2022 to December 2024, an enormous level of commitment was required, to give the WCB a chance at success.  For the first 2 years of the WCB being launched, we discovered that essentially all we could do was build trust, to prove that the WCB truly reflected the wildlife rescue industry self regulating - and, most importantly, self supporting - itself, to ensure that Wildlife Rescuers & Wildlife alike are cared for.  We had our first waves of WCB Holders, we ran Compassion Fatigue Support Sessions, Webinars, Vet & Rehabber singular and joint zoom events, we developed templates to support Veterinary Professionals & Wildlife Rescuers to build mutually strong relationships, we created platforms to share about important cases & we started to provide grants for WCB Holders & much more.  By mid 2024, we had a foundation of WCB Holders who were renewing their badge every year and bringing on new WCB Holders, by leading by example.  The WCB Map is now growing the fastest it ever has, in 2025.  We have been approached by a number of the UK’s largest animal welfare organisations, to find out about our work and to potentially work together.  We have also recently extended our services by formally hiring a ‘Wildlife Care Advisor’ to support WCB Holders and Vet Professionals on cases and to help advise any Rehabber on how to provide care to at least a minimum standard, to wildlife casualties & orphans.

• UKWT PROGRESS, THEN TO NOW:  By June 2022, demand for UKWT services had grown so much that our phone line was ringing off the hook and we lacked the sufficient Admin Volunteer support to cope with the demand.  Rescues, Vet Practices & members of the public were waiting hours just to get through to us...  I realised that there was a better way for us to run, that would operate more efficiently: I took the phone line down - so that we were no longer coordinating calls - and instead started allocating teams of our UKWT Drivers to Vet Practices & Rescues, so that they could have immediate access to our Drivers (Drivers that we had recruited, equipped and were funding fuel for) instead of having to wait for us to answer their call.  Members of the public could then ask Rescues & Practices direct for transport help, instead of having to go through us.  It took up to December 2024 to fully manifest this structure (mostly because it relied so heavily on the WCB being a success, so a great deal of my focus had to be invested there).  A lot of our work now, as well as setting up new Driver Teams each month, is recruiting new Drivers, to add onto Teams, so that we can always say 'yes' to every transport request. See how I go about that HERE. I am so pleased that today, the results from the huge amount of work that has been put into both the WCB and the new UKWT Transport Structure can be seen, in the fact that we’re transporting almost triple the wildlife numbers every month, to emergency care, than we ever were up to June 2022 - we have transported almost 1000 animals now, to emergency care - AND the new UKWT structure has pretty limitless scalability, which I’m building on every day, so that soon, ‘no wild life will be left without care.’ We have 44 Drivers Teams running (some still tiny, some substantial) across England, Scotland & Wales. We're constantly growing, and especially trying to make sure that wildlife are helped in remoter areas ASAP, where they would fall through the gap otherwise. See an example of how HERE.

So, what do we specifically fund, monthly, to help wildlife & ensure that as many wild lives as possible get to emergency care?

• We have our monthly basic running costs. They now come to £553.55, every month. See them all laid out in detail HERE.

• Not all of our transports are easy to make happen... Sometimes they take not just Vet involvement but also extra support from specific Wildlife Veterinary Professionals , who jump on the phone to help advise General Practice Vets, on how to both assess and treat wildlife pre-transport, especially in the remoter areas. We organise all of this, aware that an animal may not survive if we don't. It takes hours. We use the 'Wildlife Care Advisor' that we fund, on most of these cases. Here's an example of a 'Veterinary Support' Case.

• We fund fuel costs (about 9/10 of our Drivers decline to take fuel money from us but some of our Drivers transport A LOT and it's impossible for them to carry that cost themselves). Also, in the remoter areas we often transport wildlife a significant distace - after treatment from a Vet Practice to ensure they're 'fit for travel' - to get them to the nearest, best Wildlife Rescue, for them to rehab &, hopefully, release them: that level of fuel costs needs to be covered. In June our fuel costs - getting 151 animals to emergency care - were £459.10. In July, 230 animals were helped, with fuel costs coming to £553.52.

• Most months we fund carriers/disinfectant for at least 2 Drivers, who can't afford to fund the kit themselves up front. (They pay us back over 3 months, buying the kit from us so that they can own it themselves).

• We run as many Driver Recruitment Adverts on instagram as we can afford. In June we invested £172.44. (In July so far we have only had the funds to invest £89.89). They have proven very effective and the Drivers they've brought to us have transported 100s of lives this year alone. We would have REALLY struggled without them. See the impact each penny spent on instagram adverts has HERE.

• Sometimes we donate to Wildlife Rescues who have taken a lot of animals from us, from remoter areas (places that can be 2 hours away from them) because they have helped us a lot by taking those animals: they have given them a chance when they would have died otherwise. We donate to try and help towards the costs of the wildlife care. We have donated £93 this year so far - not much at all, compared to how much these Rescues have done to help - to 3 different Wildlife Rescues.

• We have the odd extra cost: parking, congestion charge fees, funding bespoke rescue kit to support Rescues in trickier areas etc.

Finally...

We have also recently announced - after 5 years of myself running the WCB & UKWT for over 18,000hrs, free (I have just calculated) - funding staff for the first time. This is to help MORE wild lives: as many as we can. You can see the full info on all of that HERE. [All running costs are covered first, before a salary is taken.]

If you approve of all of the above - and want to help us to help more wild lives - please donate HERE.