Olive Tree Church launches “Build our City” initiative in Umdloti
The church recently invited Umdloti Coastal Conservancy's Terry Rens for an insightful Q&A.
Is Umdloti better because you live here?
That is the key question of a discussion series titled “Build our City” recently launched by Olive Tree Church Umdloti in the run-up to the elections.
Comprising a practical component of the series, the church, in conjunction with the Umdloti Coastal Conservancy, hosted a fun dune clean-up and beach sundowner session on Sunday.
The event was held at the popular Umdloti South Beach and demonstrated one of the many practical ways in which residents could become contributors as opposed to just being consumers of their surroundings.
“Our church’s heart has always been with the local community,” said Olive Tree Church’s Christy Herselman.
She said the series was aimed at encouraging people to take ownership and find practical ways to make their living space better.
It could be as simple as greeting people who worked in your neighbourhood, thus making it a pleasant place for them to come to work, taking care of your stretch of beach or getting involved in existing community projects such as neighbourhood watches and precinct management programmes like Umdloti Smart Village.
The church recently invited Umdloti Coastal Conservancy’s Terry Rens for an insightful Q&A session on the topic of practical ways of doing so.
Rens said the disease of local governments not doing their jobs was a global problem but communities were taking charge of improving their circumstances.
She referenced the broken windows theory commonly used in criminology as a metaphor for how the small things we do make a huge difference.
According to Britannica, the theory uses broken windows as a metaphor for disorder within neignbourhoods. It links disorder and incivility within a community to subsequent occurrences of serious crime.
Similarly, if residents took care of the small things such as reporting a broken street light or pothole rather than just ranting about it, repairs would be done sooner, eliciting a positive chain reaction.
In Umdloti, faults can be reported via the eThekwini mobile application, while disturbances and municipal law infringements can be reported by calling the Metro control room at 031 361 0000 and obtaining a reference number.
Rens said planting indigenous vegetation in gardens was another practical way to “build our city.” She recommended the five plants used in Umdloti’s successful dune rehabilitation project – the beach bean (Canavalia rosea), dune vygie (Carpobrotus), trailing gazania rigens, asystasia and the aloe thraskii. For good measure she added a sixth option, the rose scented pelargonium.
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