Since its inception in 1996, the protected areas conservation trust, pact has given out over 2 point 5 million dollars in grants to organizations that promote the protection of the environment. we should add, that's only a percentage of the head tax collected from every cruise and airline visitor to Belize. But its not enough, and today the organization presented a strategic plan which will seeks out more funding sources.
Valerie Woods – Executive Director PACT
“Over the last four to five years we’ve made some good strides but we definitely have listen to the recipients of our grant monies, listen to the stakeholders who have not received grant monies and have taken that into consideration. There is a lot of room for improvement, a lot of room to bring more value in terms of the grants and this exercise has helped us to look at even revisit our board make up and make some strong recommendations to do that. Our board has endorsed it. Look at also the technical evaluation of grants as well as the technical capacities if you will of the recipients and how we as a trust fund can help them to make sure what they present to us is more successful in terms of getting money out of PACT.”
“What we hope to present today and will come out clearly is that our priority is to look at our funding base, currently it’s strictly tourism and we’d like to diversify that immediately and strategically.”
“Secondly is to look at the actual grants program. We engineered that entire process to make sure that we’re not only looking at your traditional calls for proposals but that if there is a broad conservation initiative that we can get in to, we don’t implement we just provide the funding, we would like to find a way that we can do that. And then also to address the need of, there is a lot of non government organizations and individuals that are doing a lot of work for conservation either in tandem with the government or on their own but they are doing it voluntarily and its not being able to be sustained. So we have identified some ways by which we can begin to alleviate some of that. it will require some changes in our law, where we can match a portion of what it will cost for them to do that but not significant portion perhaps a fifteen to twenty percent.”
“ In addition to that, we’re looking at governance, trying to make our board a lot more autonomous, more effective in what it is doing. it will mean restructuring the makeup of the board”.
The strategic plan is the end result of a year long process of consultations with stakeholders. it is to be used to guide PACT's operations from this year up until 2009.