Castlecliff Coast Care Awarded Horizons grants
Horizons Regional Council has awarded 21 grants to community projects from the inaugural Kanorau Koiora Taketake – Indigenous Biodiversity Community Grant. The fund was heavily over-subscribed with a total of 37 applications requesting more than $1 million, but the 21 grants will be funded from the $260,000 available, with 8 of them in Whanganui.
Two grants to Bushy Park Tarapurhui Trust and another to Castlecliff Coast Care have been welcomed by those two organisations.
Graham of Castlecliff Coast Care says, “Coast Care has received $5,217 towards plant purchases (Spnifex and Pingao that is grown for us from see we collect, to give us eco-sourced plants), general maintenance of gear and also weed control.”
Over the winter planting season 209 people have contributed to several planting sessions, The August lockdown only delayed some final planting sessions for Castlecliff schoool, the weavers, and a final planting at Morgan Street.
In addition to general community input, IDEA services clients, a local weaving group, a new Careers in Conservation project and Castlecliff School, contributed to specific project areas.
Cameron, from Socio-Ecological Learning Environment group, brought along students doing the Careers in Conservation studies. These were 14 Senior Hight School students, on 10 and 12 August to learn how dunes work and especially our dynamic west coast dunes. In addition to helping with either planting or preparing for the community planting day, we spent time talking about how to measure success in these types of programs and spent time actually using monitoring systems to measure the plants.”