Cape Town celebrated International Volunteer Day on Dec 05, 2024. Marking this day, City and SANParks extended their gratitude to the passionate environmental volunteers for their exemplary efforts to improve and maintain the beauty and healthy condition of the natural environment of Cape Town.
Deputy Mayor of the City of Cape Town – Mayor Eddie Andrews attended the volunteers appreciation event at The SANParks offices in Tokai on the night of Dec 04, 2024 and thanked the key partners of the Cape Town.
The Volunteer Appreciation Day witnessed the attendance of the various environment volunteer group representatives. The event day kicked off with an alien invasive species hack in Tokai Park.
This was then followed by a guided walk which was led by Prof. Tony Rebelo from the Friends of Tokai Park who provided insights on the history and conservation of the arboretum and their current restoration project of Real Yellow-wood trees.
Later, the walk was followed by the appreciation event where there were speeches from the City of Cape Town and SANParks, and the volunteers received the awards too.
Certification of recognition was accepted by one of the volunteers – Russell Hope for the Friends of Batavia Street Fynbos Area Group. The group identified endangered species in the Batavia Street Fynbos area in Bothasig three years ago.
Since then, they have achieved great success in removing all alien vegetation in the area and has planted beautiful fynbos plants and sowed many protea seeds, which will beautify the space even more in much better way.
Considering this, the City of Cape Town extended a huge thanks and expressed their gratitude towards the Bothasig community for their efforts and passion for the important conservation projects.
Notably, the International Volunteer Day is observed every year on December 05 for economic and social development. Commonly it is referred as International Volunteer Day (IVD) and is an international observance, which is declared mandatory by the UN General Assembly, back in 1985.
It offers an opportunity for the organisations which are involved as volunteers and consider individual volunteers to promote volunteerism. It encourages the governments to support volunteer efforts and recognise the contributions by volunteer for gaining the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially at local, national and international levels.