Penny Patterson

The Gorilla Foundation’s mission is to learn about gorillas by communicating with them, and apply our knowledge to save them from extinction in the wild, and significantly improve their lives in captivity. We do this via a unique program of interspecies communication-based research and care, which produces powerful empathy-evoking multimedia educational tools that are distributed worldwide, both physically and virtually. TGF is best known for “Project Koko,” the longest running interspecies communication study in history, during which Koko has become an ambassador for great apes and a “voice for Nature.”