For its fiscal year 2025-26, the Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF) will direct $2 million in Grant-In-Aid (GIA) funding for wild sheep conservation and management projects, primarily requested through its Chapter and Affiliate network.

"Our Grant-in-Aid conservation funding keeps growing every year and is a vital component of our overall Mission Program Funding," said Gray N. Thornton, President and CEO of the Wild Sheep Foundation. "While this $2 million represents only a portion of our total $4.144 million budgeted in Operations Mission Program Funding, it is where the rubber meets the road, as they say – direct to on-the-ground and research projects.”

Twenty-five projects, spanning from British Columbia to New Mexico, Yukon to Nevada, and internationally in Central Asia, were awarded grants. The largest grants are $210,000 each to support continuation of a multi-year, tri-state comprehensive disease surveillance/management project in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, as well as health and disease surveillance and recovery efforts in the ION project in Idaho, Oregon, and Nevada. All funded projects will benefit wild sheep populations in areas of critical need, including habitat management, water development, land acquisition, survey/inventory, and expanded pathogen surveillance and disease management.

In its past fiscal year from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025, WSF raised and directed a record $11.5 million to its Mission programs. In this total, WSF raised and returned $7.18 million to state, provincial, territorial, and tribal/First Nation wildlife agencies to help fund their wild sheep and wildlife programs by auctioning their conservation permits at the Foundation’s 2025 Sheep Show® in Reno.

"Over $11 million, for two consecutive years, for a wildlife resource is an incredible contribution for any organization, let alone one of our size,” Thornton concluded. "We take our role in being the facilitators that help make putting and keeping more wild sheep on the mountain seriously. More wild sheep equals more interest, advocacy, and hunting opportunities, which drives more funding for even more wild sheep into the future. It’s a specialized economy, but it works."

The Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF), based in Bozeman, Mont., was founded in 1977 by sportsmen and other wild sheep conservationists. WSF is the premier advocate for wild sheep, having raised and expended more than $156 million, positively impacting these species through population and habitat enhancements, research and education, and conservation advocacy programs in North America, Europe, and Asia to “Put and Keep Wild Sheep On the Mountain”®. In North America, these and other efforts have increased bighorn sheep populations from historic lows in the 1950s-60s of 25,000 to more than 85,000 today. WSF has a membership of more than 11,000 worldwide. www.wildsheepfoundation.org.