As a registered CBO, we owe our members, partners and donors an honest accounting of what a given year actually looked like, not just the highlight stories but the fuller picture across every programme. This is our look back at 2025, drawn from the same site visit logs, attendance records and nursery tracking our Executive Committee reviews at each Annual General Meeting.
Clean-ups and waste diverted
2025 saw our clean-up roster expand meaningfully, with Fedha Estate joining in October and groundwork laid for Buruburu's addition early the following year. Across all clean-up sites for the year, we logged waste collection at every session, sorted where possible into general waste, recyclables and organics, with recyclables routed to a local recycler and organic material where volumes justified it directed to composting rather than general disposal. The riparian strip clean-up near Greenfields Estate in particular stood out as one of the higher-volume single sessions of the year, reflecting how much construction debris and dumped waste had accumulated there before it was addressed.
We also began the Savannah Estate waste-sorting pilot during the year, which by year's end had visibly reduced the volume of general waste the estate was sending out weekly, a result we're now using as a reference case when pitching the same model to other estates.
Trees planted and nursery output
Our nursery continued producing seedlings across the year, feeding both community planting days and the growing number of individual households collecting seedlings directly for their own compounds. Survival rates for nursery-hardened seedlings remained meaningfully better than our earliest, pre-nursery plantings from 2022, a gap that has held steady as the youth nursery team's experience has deepened with each successive batch.
By the close of 2025 our running total of trees planted since the programme began was well on its way toward the 500-tree milestone we reached in August 2026, with indigenous species continuing to make up the large majority of what went into the ground across our corridor and household plantings alike.
Education and household reach
Our environmental education programme was active in three partner primary schools through the year, running waste audits, nursery visits and planting sessions each term, alongside our first full-scale school-holiday environmental camp. Household sustainability sessions, covering composting, water conservation and energy efficiency, ran monthly across different parts of Donholm, and it was during this year that we ran the community composting pilot that failed, a genuinely useful setback that directly shaped the household-level model we now teach instead.
Our youth green livelihoods track also formalised during 2025, moving from informal skill-sharing on our own planting sites to a structured training path that has since produced several participants who've gone on to paid landscaping work for estates and households in the area.
Governance and partnerships
Our Executive Committee held its required Annual General Meeting with the full membership, reviewing the year's activities and finances against the Constitution adopted in 2022. Groundwork for our current NEMA working arrangement and closer coordination with Nairobi County departments both began during 2025, arrangements that became fully operational in the months that followed and now shape how several of our programmes are planned.
We're publishing this kind of accounting periodically on the blog going forward, both as a record for our own membership and as a transparency commitment to donors and partners who reasonably want to see what their support has actually funded, not just the individual stories but the fuller pattern across a full year of activity.
What we'd do differently looking back
Not every part of 2025 went as planned, and an honest annual report should say so. The community composting pilot's failure cost real time and some goodwill among the households who'd first tried it before it was discontinued, and in hindsight we'd have piloted the household-level alternative sooner rather than persisting with the shared-site model for as long as we did. Similarly, a couple of our earlier clean-up sites saw waste re-accumulate faster than expected between visits, a problem our current, more structured quarterly roster with resident-led interim upkeep was specifically designed to address going into the following year.
We include these setbacks deliberately alongside the milestones, because a report that only lists successes isn't a genuinely useful account of the year, and our members and partners are better served by an accurate picture than a purely favourable one. The changes that came out of 2025's setbacks, a stronger clean-up rotation model and a more durable approach to household composting, are, in a real sense, as much a product of the year as the milestones we're prouder to report.
We'll continue publishing this kind of yearly account going forward, and we're already tracking the data that will feed into the 2026 edition: nursery output past the 500-tree milestone, the newly formalised NEMA and county relationships, and a fuller year of the youth green livelihoods track now that it runs on a defined structure rather than the informal arrangement it started as in 2025. Members and partners wanting the underlying activity logs behind any figure in this summary are welcome to request them through our Contact page ahead of the next Annual General Meeting.