If your company abstracts from or discharges into the Rwizi, we would particularly like to hear from you, and the conversation will be a frank one.
How companies support us
Site sponsorship
Fund a named stretch from survey through to the twelve-month check. You get the survival figure, whatever it is.
Staff volunteering days
A planting morning or a nursery day. We ask for a genuine half day rather than a photograph, and we brief people properly first.
Matched giving
Match what your staff give. Costs you nothing to set up and roughly doubles staff participation.
In-kind support
Vehicles, fuel, polythene, tools and transport are all genuinely useful. Branded merchandise is not.
What we will and will not do
We will provide a written annual impact statement with figures you can cite in your own reporting, including the survival rate and the monitoring caveats.
We will not provide an endorsement of a company's environmental performance. Supporting restoration work is not the same as having a good record, and we are not in a position to certify anybody.
If a partnership would require us to soften what we publish about the river, we will decline it. We would rather have a smaller budget than a compromised monitoring page.
What a staff volunteering day actually involves
- 1
A briefing before the day
Where the site is, why that stretch, and who farms it. People work better when they know whose land they are standing on.
- 2
A morning of physical work
Usually in mud, usually finished by early afternoon. Nobody needs experience and nobody needs their own tools.
- 3
The conversation that comes with it
The households farming the bank are there. Much of a planting morning is agreeing where the buffer runs before anything reaches the ground, and that is the part worth watching.
- 4
The count
Every planting is counted and the stretch is marked so it can be found again. Your team's day appears in a survival figure a year later.
What you can put in your own reporting
| You can state | We will not support |
|---|---|
| Metres of bank planted, by site and date | A claim that a stretch is permanently restored |
| Twelve-month survival for the site you funded | A survival figure quoted without the date it was counted |
| Staff hours contributed, and what they went on | Volunteering hours presented as an environmental outcome |
| Amount given and what it was spent on | An endorsement of your environmental performance |
| Carbon: nothing | Any carbon offset or neutrality claim, in any form |
We do not sell offsets and we will not support a carbon claim
Riverbank restoration on this scale is not a measured carbon project, and treating it as one would require sequestration accounting we do not do and cannot verify. If you need offsets, buy them from someone who measures them. What we can give you is a survival figure with a date on it.
Questions companies ask
Can we brand the site?
You can be named as the funder of a stretch, on this website and in our reporting. We do not put branded signage on a riverbank that belongs to somebody else.
What if the survival figure is poor?
You get it anyway, with the reason. Our own published average is 61% at twelve months, and the sites that dragged it down are named on the lessons page.
How large does a partnership need to be?
There is no floor. Matched giving costs nothing to set up and roughly doubles staff participation, which is often the most useful thing a company does for us.
We abstract from or discharge into the Rwizi.
Then we would particularly like to hear from you, and the conversation will be frank. We will not take sponsorship from an organisation discharging into the catchment while it is still doing so, but we will talk about what would have to change.
Talk to the Executive Director
Corporate conversations go to the top of the organisation, not to a fundraising desk.