Building Bridges to Boorowa
Building Bridges to Boorowa
A 25-year partnership between North Sydney Bushcare and Boorowa Community Landcare Group
Collaborations -
LEP23 - 014_LLC01_2
The issue
The Building Bridges to Boorowa program started in 2000, when a North Sydney Bushcare volunteer learnt of the environmental problems facing the Boorowa area, including soil salinity and loss of habitat for threatened species including the Superb Parrot.
North Sydney Bushcare then identified an opportunity to help Boorowa landholders with their revegetation projects by bringing volunteers to the area for a weekend to help plant trees & shrubs.
Farmers have the land to be able to plant mass trees and create a significant amount of positive change to our environment and natural habitats and ecosystems. However, the cost to the farmer is very significant and commonly these revegetation projects are put off due to the expense of labour, fencing, spraying, ripping, trees and guards, all necessary elements of a successful revegetation project.
The solution
The partnership with North Sydney Bushcare has provided a solution to one of the farmers biggest challenges, labour.
Every year North Sydney Bushcare recruits a team of volunteers to travel to Boorowa for the weekend to plant trees on farms in the Boorowa area. The partnership works as everyone has their own role to play. The volunteers provide time, pay for their accommodation and breakfasts. The farm prepares the sites and buys the trees and guards. Hilltops council contributes funds towards the Saturday evening dinner for everyone. The Boorowa Community Landcare group provides the coordinator to organise the event and an active committee to support the coordinator and help on the weekend. Together we plant trees, lots of them, in only one weekend each year.
This year we celebrated our 25-year anniversary of the partnership, and we were very excited to sign another MOU between North Sydney Council, Hilltops Council and the Boorowa Community Landcare Group to secure the program for another 5 years.
The impact
The team from North Sydney came to Boorowa with 40 volunteers (including the mayor, Councillors, and staff). Alongside the Boorowa Community Landcare Group committee and a handful of members we planted over 5000 native trees and shrubs across 3 properties and 3 days. To date over 73,000 trees have been planted in the Boorowa area by the North Sydney volunteers.
This year we also hosted a bird surveyor who was able to conduct follow up bird surveys on several previous plantings which are now approximately 10 years old. He also conducted baseline surveys on this year’s plantings so we can assess the environmental change to those areas in the future.