Thanks to our wonderful supporters, we’ve eliminated the land purchase debt on Walker Swamp!
Our financial supporters have already heard the good news in a very special update on New Years Eve, but we can now share this story with the rest of our NGT newsletter subscribers… we’ve reached our target for the land purchase component of the Walker Swamp project – one of NGT’s Restoration Reserves.
It has been a long and complex journey, but after 4 years of planning and thanks to the incredible support of our partners (see logos below), Stage 1 of the Walker Swamp Restoration Reserve was announced in May 2018, followed by an ambitious plan we shared in June 2018, to double the project area to more than 1000 acres of the Wannon River floodplain wetlands.
Fast forward to today, 18 months later, we are extremely proud to announce that thanks to further contributions of both new and previous supporters over the Christmas period, we passed our milestone on the 31st of December 2019…
The live tally is …
What exactly does this mean?
As a result of 259 donations received since June 2018, which ranged in value from $5 up to $20,000 (yes, they all add up!), the last of the debt NGT has been carrying on the land purchase costs for the Walker Swamp property has been eliminated. This fantastic news is the result of people power, and shows just what we can achieve when we work together towards a larger goal.
A quick reminder: the funding formula we adopted for this project was an 80/20 split, where 80% of the $150,000 target, or $120,000, was required to cover the last portion of our land purchase costs after other contributions, and the remaining $30,000 will now be invested in the NGT Foundation, to contribute towards ongoing future management needs across all NGT Reserves, including Walker Swamp.
If you would like to learn more about the NGT Foundation, then please follow this link, but in short, any funds invested in the NGT Foundation will be perpetually preserved and only future interest or investment earnings will be used to support the ongoing management of NGT Reserves.
In order to be effective and meet this goal, we aim to grow the preserved Foundation balance to a significant sum (i.e. in the order of millions of dollars). This means that yes – we still have a long way to go, but we are making important progress thanks to you, because 20% of every contribution to the Walker Swamp campaign has now been invested in the NGT Foundation. In this way, these donations to NGT will “keep on giving”.
The current view at Walker Swamp
In case you are wondering, the current view at Walker Swamp is changing fast. The same hot, windy and dry conditions that have fanned the recent bushfires, have seen evaporation reduce water coverage and depth – but we still have water for the moment! It is worth noting that because of below average runoff in spring 2019, and despite looking magnificent at our event in September, Walker Swamp did not fill to capacity in 2019 – so we probably won’t see the water last right through the autumn in 2020, unless we get a big dump of summer or autumn rain!
In the meantime, here is the changing view of the eastern portion of the wetland…
In addition to the many private donors who have made this outcome possible, Nature Glenelg Trust is also especially grateful to the following organisations and programs for their role in helping us to finance the purchase of the site and/or support the major restoration works undertaken over the past 18 months.
