Friends of the Liesbeek (FoL) currently finds itself in the most financially precarious position in its 31 years of existence.
On Tuesday 16 August at the community-based, non-profit organisation’s AGM held at The Vineyard Hotel in Newlands, FoL’s treasurer Grant Irlam shared that they were sitting with a net deficit of over R180 000.
Stating that they needed “to close this gap”, Irlam said that this – in the face of a global recession and the financial fallout left in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic – would be one of FoL’s biggest challenges going forward.
“We’ve got project successes. It is just a case of getting those successes out there,” said Irlam, adding that they hoped to win the support of more big corporates in the coming year.
Established in 1991, the aim of FoL is “to create an awareness of the importance of the Liesbeek as a green corridor in an urban setting and to rehabilitate, enhance, and conserve it and its environs”. With the Liesbeek stretching over 9 km, this is no small task.
A quick look at FoL’s financials shows that the bulk of their expenditure goes towards the Liesbeek Maintenance Project (LMP), with the focus being on cleaning the riparian edge (the land on the banks of the river), managing and controlling alien invasive species while replanting with indigenous vegetation.
At present, the team includes eight members and six interns. Also speaking at Tuesday’s AGM, FoL’s chair Nick Fordyce said that they could not overstate how significant the LMP’s work has been.
He said that, thanks to this model, not only were they able to do constructive, impactful work on the river, but they were also able to create meaningful jobs.
“Their work often gets lumped or sort of listed under the label ‘maintenance’, but it is truly a massive contribution. How we’ve been able to set up multiple community days in the form of our monthly rubbish collections and, in Observatory, our weeding, digging and planting days that we set up to go with Kevin Winter’s Rosebank Canal Project, and recently our Mandela Day initiative,” said Fordyce.
The Rosebank Canal Rehabilitation Project was launched at the beginning of the year. Funded by Future Water (an interdisciplinary research institute at the University of Cape Town), the Water Hub (a research, demonstration and training centre) and FoL, and funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the pilot project focused on a 200 m stretch of the canal running through Rosebank.
The project entailed first weeding the canal and then re-designing it – reinforcing four rock weirs and flattening sediment.
Once all of the preparation work was done, about 1 400 Palmiet seedlings were transferred to this section of the canal on Saturday 26 March.
During their Mandela Day initiative, over 100 volunteers spent their 67 minutes assisting FoL in rehabilitating an overgrown patch of an important river corridor in Observatory (opposite The Wild Fig Restaurant).
With the LMP having done most of the heavy lifting the week before – clearing the selected area alongside the river of the tenacious Kikuyu grass growing there – volunteers replanted the patch with indigenous species native to the area on Monday 19 July. Commenting on Irlam’s finance report, Fordyce said it was difficult to listen to.
“But I really want to emphasise the fact that in the last year, we’ve not been able to raise the LMP team’s salaries. And the significance of that in the context of the way the cost of living has gone up in the last year, it is truly horrifying. Our team continued to be loyal to our project. We are working as a committee very hard to try and address that challenge,” he said.
He also commended Irlam for finding ways to keep FoL going throughout the Covid-19 pandemic years when donations dropped to their lowest in the organisation’s history.
“Frankly, it is remarkable that we made it through them. It is proof that not all superheroes wear capes,” he said. According to Fordyce, FoL’s committee had begun the work to source more funders and to diversify their funding source.
“We are awaiting feedback on a number of applications that we submitted requests for and we are soon hoping to be registered as a beneficiary of the Woolworth’s MySchool MyVillage MyPlanet card.” The programme channels funding to the charity of shoppers’ choice every time they shop with the retailer.
Continuing on this positive note, Fordyce said that even though the past couple of years had been “a wild ride”, what with the Cape drought, the pandemic and periods of loadshedding, it also showed our nation’s resilience.
“We’ve all shown remarkable resilience as South Africans, as Capetonians and as the Friends, and in my view, 2022 has represented something of a triumph. We’ve been able to sort of shed that pandemic cloak that’s hung over all of us and, as the Friends, we’ve been able to do what we like doing – getting back to the river and making an impact.”
- For more information on Friends of the Liesbeek, email info@fol.org.za
