Every organisation has a founding story, and ours starts with a fairly ordinary frustration: a group of Donholm residents tired of watching dumping spread, green spaces shrink, and no one in particular taking responsibility for either.
From informal conversations to organised action
What started as conversations among neighbours turned into informal weekend clean-ups, then into a shared realisation that lasting change would need more than occasional volunteer effort, it would need structure, a clear mission, and a way to be taken seriously by the authorities and partners whose cooperation the work would eventually depend on. Those early, informal clean-ups were genuinely small, a handful of neighbours and whatever tools they already owned, but they established the working relationships that later became our founding membership.
The decision to formalise wasn't unanimous at first; some founding members were wary of the administrative overhead a registered CBO would require. What ultimately settled it was a practical concern: an informal group had no standing to request support from local authorities or apply for the kind of partnerships that would later include our work with NEMA.
What the name was chosen to reflect
That realisation led directly to the Constitution adopted on 5 May 2022 and registration as a CBO two weeks later. The name Pro-Green Shapers was chosen deliberately: not just people who care about the environment, but people actively shaping it, one clean-up, one planted tree and one household habit at a time, a distinction founding members felt mattered given how much environmental conversation, in their experience, stayed at the level of concern without translating into action.
We mark this founding story periodically on the blog, partly as a record for our own membership and partly because new volunteers often find it useful context for understanding why the organisation runs the way it does today, structured, deliberate, and built from a series of specific decisions rather than a single grand plan.