Cleaning up Fairlands the Community Cleaners way

A recent Saturday morning had members of Fairland, Northcliff, and Berario get up early to participate in a clean-up hosted by non-profit company, Community Cleaners. They cleared a large section of land found along 14th Avenue of various forms of rubbish and discarded scraps.

Read more: Community Cleaners host a Fairland site clean-up

For the past four years this group’s volunteers have traded their weekend sleep-ins for early wake up calls in aid of their community, and though it’s journey has had visible and rewarding triumphs, it has not been without great work. Its founder, André Swanepoel, shares just why.

The initial stages of an NPC like theirs are always challenging, especially when it comes to getting the word out. “It took us a while to get this thing off the ground. We started in October 2021with a lot of people at the start, some of whom are still with us, but a lot fell off too.”
Attributing to those challenges is that a lot of their work takes place on the weekends, which community members, ideally, want to have to themselves, especially after a long work week. “Doing this is a pain in the backside, but with a nice motivated team, a lot can get done.”

Through it, he has been able to meet a lot of great people with varying job titles, all together picking up rubbish. “It doesn’t matter what your status in life is, in this environment we are all equal.”

When asked why he thinks community members are not eager to take part in such clean-ups within their neighbourhoods, he suspects it has something to do with the 80/20 rule. Where 20% of people support and take part, about 80%, which is the vast majority, will sit and watch the job get done by others. “This speaks to all the groups who do work like ours across the country,” he explained, surmising that unless the problem is in their front yard, people are not interested in being part of the solution. “Not to be rude, but people are complacent, they think they pay their rates and taxes, so, therefore, why must they worry about it? Even with rates and taxes, we are still not getting value for our money. So, if we don’t do it, it’s not going to happen.”

He was stern when saying an open space, like the one found along 14th Avenue, being strewn with rubbish should be something community members take action against because of the broken window theory, which suggests that once a community shows signs of disorder it encourages more serious issues. “If one person is illegally dumping, then someone else sees and dumps there too. It causes a ripple effect, and then it starts looking like a mess.”

This leads to a community’s loss of control, which he determines has been the fate of may neighbourhoods across the city.

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