Staff
Grace Williams
Founding Executive Director
I’m Grace Williams, and one of the constants in my life has been my passion for animals. I was born in Waynesville, OH in 1992, and as an only child, I spent a lot of my time playing with our family’s many rescue pets.
Our very first rescue dog happened to be a 168-pound Saint Bernard, Oliver, who we adopted when I was eight years old. He was my soccer team’s mascot, even wearing his own jersey, and the leader of all the fun at a girl’s night sleepover, lying right in the middle of all the girls.
In middle and high school, I satisfied my passion for horses by volunteering at a therapeutic horseback riding facility. On my 16th birthday, I received a rescue horse of my own, RockStar, thanks to a family friend; that horse, who I fondly call “Rock,” still happens to be the love of my life!
I attended college at Xavier University, studying biology. While there, I participated on the Manatee Research Team at the Cincinnati Zoo, with the idea that I wanted to work in marine mammal rehabilitation and rescue when I graduated. This led me to my first internship, during the summer of 2014, for the Topeka Zoo, during which much of my time was spent working with elephants (I also fell in love with the hippo!). This first internship was life-changing and led to a firm conviction: I wanted to be an elephant keeper.
I was fortunate enough to work with elephants again, at Wildlife Safari in Winston, OR, and then I landed my first job in Birmingham, Alabama at the Birmingham Zoo. When that job concluded, I spent some time juggling my work as a nanny and time traveling, to Europe, Thailand, India, Uganda, and Kenya.
During several of these trips, I have been fortunate enough to have some intimate and life-changing experiences with elephants. My favorite elephant that I have met thus far happens to be in Pai, Thailand and her name is Tutdao. In only three days, I was able to make such a strong connection with this elephant during our walks to and from the river for drinks and a swim, but my favorite time spent with her was walking her to the mountain and putting her to “bed” for the night. We also happen to have the same birthdate! These experiences, along with my elephant care experience in the United States, have solidified an understanding of my purpose in this life.
Sometime in this gap while nannying and traveling, I hit upon an ambitious goal. It is a daunting aspiration, but enormously important to me: I am going to open an elephant orphanage in Africa, in order to rescue, rehabilitate, and release orphaned elephants due to poaching and other forms of human-wildlife conflict.
Follow my journeys around the world as I start this new, crazy adventure with elephants!
Dr. Steeve Ngama
Advisors & Key Collaborator
Steeve is dedicated to mitigating human wildlife conflict and works on development and research projects. He has conducted several studies on improving forest elephant conservation by using the integrative approaches of ecophysiology. Steeve is a Gabonese research fellow highly motivated and involved in wildlife conservation for the last fourteen years. He has conducted field research activities and development projects as well.
Steeve spent his first professional years investigating bush meat consumption and animal breeding by local people in Gabon. Because of the recurrence and acuity of the human elephant conflict in Gabon, he now focuses his research work on this topic and forest elephant conservation. He believes that conserving forest elephants relies mostly on the ability of local people to coexist with elephants. For that, Steeve leads a local Agricultural and Conservation NGO (SCOOPS-ELABE) aiming to promote organic and sustainable agriculture and human-elephant coexistence as well. At the same time, he was appointed as a Research Program Manager (in Wildlife and Sustainable Development) at IRAF-CENAREST, the Gabonese research institute.
Bridget Burns
Advisors & Key Collaborator
Bridget Burns brings hands-on animal care experience and is dedicated to the conservation of wildlife and their habitats. While earning her Bachelor’s degree in Captive Wildlife Care and Education at Unity College in Maine, she volunteered and interned at several wildlife refuges, nature centers, zoos, and animal rehabilitation facilities. She interned at Wildlife Safari where she cross trained in the elephant department, working with both Asian and African elephants.
After working for a time as a zookeeper for Ross Park Zoo in New York, she moved to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to join the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center (GWDC), becoming Lead Keeper and a founding member of the conservation and research team as well as liaison for GWDC’s Zoo-Park Partnership with Yellowstone National Park. She continues to serve as GWDC’s Conservation Coordinator part-time. She also currently works as Conservation & Partnerships Manager for the Wildlife Restoration Foundation