Help Up has been cleaning up Black River by using financial pledges to pay people to work for a few hours, and now their crowdfund is taking off.
Cape Town, South Africa – Help Up is an organisation that works to clean up problem areas that are littered or polluted by using pledges they receive from the public to pay people that need employment. The people are paid to work on these areas for a few hours. Help Up is managed by Georgia Mctaggart who gets stuck in with the people that help her.
Their most recent cleanup focus has been to clear out part of the Black River in Cape Town. The river runs through the northern parts of Cape Town and is often littered with plastic and other waste.
The organisation relies on generous donors to help them pay for more people to work. They require just R50.00 to pay a person for 2-hours work. Not nearly a massive amount but just enough to make an enormous difference.
“Our pledges range from R50 to R150 depending on the type of clean. So for the Black River Cleanup, we pay the avatars much more than they would earn doing a street cleanup.”
One of their regular volunteers, Alan Matthews, decided to start a crowdfund to help them raise a large chunk of money to help them do even more.
“My name is Alan, and I’m one of a group of volunteers that joins the Avatars on their cleanups. On a typical weekend cleanup, there will be 4-6 people in the river and we take out about 50 bags (!!) full of rubbish.
The stuff that we pull out of the river is a disgusting mix of plastic bags, diapers, bottles, old clothing, polystyrene, chip packets, straws, wrappers, etc. Without the hard work of this team to take it out, it would all be washed into when it washes down into the sea.
Each cleanup event cost about R500. That goes mostly to paying the Help Up Avatars with a little bit for drinks, snacks, and transport.
1 cleanup removes 50 bags of rubbish – so it works out to around R10 per bag taken out! Bags are sponsored by Tuffy and the team does everything reasonable to keep costs to a minimum.
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My goal is to raise enough funds to enable the Help Up team to cover their cleanups for the rest of 2019.”
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