On 19 May 2022, the Department of Social Development registered Pro-Green Shapers as a Community Based Organization, Reg. No. EMB/SD/CBO/072/2022, two weeks after our founding members adopted the Constitution that still governs how we operate today.
From a founding meeting to a running organisation
What began as a group of Donholm residents concerned about dumping and dying green spaces has grown into an organisation running scheduled clean-ups, a tree nursery, household sustainability training and an environmental education programme reaching several primary schools in Embakasi East. None of that structure existed at the founding meeting itself, which was, by most accounts, a handful of neighbours agreeing that something needed to change and that waiting for someone else to change it wasn't working.
The three years since have added the parts that turned that agreement into an actual programme: an elected Executive Committee accountable to the wider membership, a tree nursery built after our first planting season taught us that bought seedlings alone weren't sustainable, and a clean-up roster that has since expanded from Donholm itself into Greenfields, Savannah, Buruburu and Fedha.
What guides the next three years
The Constitution we adopted at founding set out a vision: a clean, green and environmentally sustainable Embakasi East, where every resident takes an active part in conservation. Three years on, that line still describes exactly what we're working toward, one clean-up and one planting day at a time. What's changed is scale rather than mission, more neighbourhoods on the clean-up roster, more households trained in sustainable practices, more schools running environmental clubs, and a nursery producing far more seedlings than our first planting day ever used.
We're marking the anniversary less with an event than with a commitment: to keep the reporting on this blog honest about what's working and what isn't, the way our first attempt at community composting, which failed, taught us more than several successful clean-ups combined. That kind of transparency is, we think, part of what it means to take our own Constitution seriously.