Jane Goodall's institute was based in Tucson for 7 years

Her nonprofit institute, the Jane Goodall Institute for Wildlife Research, was based in Tucson for seven years, moving here from San Francisco in 1986. Its Tucson administrative headquarters handled fund-raising, publicity, accounting, personnel and program development.

In 1990, it moved from a stone house it leased on the west side near Tumamoc Hill to 2200 E. Speedway, after Texas billionaire Ed Bass — original financer of Biosphere 2 near Oracle — bought the building and donated it to the institute. Though branch offices sprung up in the United Kingdom, Canada and Tanzania, “The Tucson office will always be the main headquarters,” Goodall said at a 1990 press conference here.

While Goodall’s home then was Gombe, Tanzania, home to at least 150 chimps, she visited Tucson often. In 1992, for instance, she was here to help organize her then-new environmental-education program for middle-school students around the world, Roots and Shoots. Also, the institute’s 2000 International ChimpanZoo Conference, presenting research findings on captive and wild chimpanzees, was held at Tucson’s Westward Look Resort, featuring a public forum and lecture by Goodall. In 2007, Goodall was a keynote speaker for Pima Community College’s Earth Day celebration.

In 1993, the renamed Jane Goodall Institute moved its headquarters to Washington, D.C., to be near Capitol Hill and national conservation organizations as Goodall advocated for legislation associated with habitat conservation and the illegal transportation of animals. “Tucson has been extremely good for the institute in many ways,” but the nonprofit needed “that key presence” in Washington, its executive director Robert J. Edison said then.