by Helen Martin
Since Joe Oliver created the Facebook group page ‘Cableleigh Drive and surrounding roads community’ on 13 September, 49 people have joined. Joe’s intention, “to prioritise making Helensville a better place to live” has gained a lot of support and was boosted by community sponsorship for the tidy up, including use of a waste disposal vehicle.
To begin with, the group will hold a working bee in October to beautify their street. “I got sick of seeing rubbish lying around and the walkway overgrown with weeds and junk. We have a new playground being built and new LED lighting has been put in, which is a big improvement, so now the place just needs a general tidy up,” says Joe. “People are telling me they’re hoping to get their teenagers to join in.”
The first working bee cleaning up the public spaces will be a morning or afternoon weekend event, where participants will be given gloves and rubbish bags and split into two groups, so they can start at different ends of the street. The clean-up will be followed by an informal get-together in the street.
While Joe and his partner Julia have only lived in Helensville for three years, they are both keen to make a difference to their patch. They are busy people – Joe is operations manager for a Warkworth trucking business, Julia works for Plunket and they have a two-year-old daughter Naiomi – but they see value in making time for this. “We could write letters to the Council and wait for them to do it, but that seems like the long way round. We can make a difference doing it ourselves, it just seems the right thing to do.”
(In the last weekend of September, the roadside cleanup Operation Springclean, organised annually by South Kaipara Landcare, was held at South Head, followed by a BBQ at Waioneke School).
