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It was 2015 when farmers Kevin and Gill Adshead brought kiwi back onto their Glorit farm and dreamt up an ambitious plan to create a pest-free land corridor to allow them to spread safely from the west to east coasts.
That was the beginning of The Forest Bridge Trust and on Thursday last week, around 100 founders and supporters celebrated the group’s 10th anniversary at the Mahurangi Hope Centre in Warkworth.
The gathering heard how the trust had grown from meetings around the kitchen table at the Adsheads’ Mataia homestead to a thriving organisation with 26 full-time employees supporting and connecting landowners, community groups and students in a common cause.
Early strategist Annette Lees said she was quickly told she didn’t need to convince farmers about the benefits of conservation – they knew that already – but they did need funding and time.
“That grew into three core values – empathy, integrity and respect,” she said. “From those first few meetings, that dream has been carried a long way and in a lot of directions. There has been extraordinary progress and big things achieved.”
Not only are kiwi now thriving on both coasts and at Mount Tamahunga, the trust has worked with 894 landowners, supplied 1047 properties with traps, educated nearly 900 school students, organised 117 events and workshops, put in almost 55km of fencing, planted 156,417 plants and trees, and trapped 114,566 pests.
Chief executive Ana Christmas added that TFBT had provided 141,308 hours of employment – “enough time for someone to earn more than 50 university degrees” – and the equivalent of 80 paid, full-time roles.
Save the Kiwi chief executive Michelle Impey said it was the previous government’s Jobs for Nature funding five years ago that gave the trust its real impetus, enabling the implementation of 160,000 hectares of pest control far more rapidly than anyone could have hoped.
“Conservation is a skilled profession and it brought people together. It was wonderful seeing iwi and hapu return to their rohe, and we now have a skilled workforce,” she said.
However, with that funding coming to an end on June 30, the trust is facing new challenges and jobs will be lost, Christmas warned.
“Our workforce will reduce from 26 full-time to 12, not because we want to but simply because we don’t have funding confirmed to sustain it,” she said.
“We’re entering a year of consolidation. Our organisation will flatten. We have 14 funding applications and pitches out there, but there’ll be fewer community events and public gatherings, no free predator control set-ups or volunteer coordinators, but while this chapter closes, TFBT is here to stay. The work isn’t finished.”
The retrenchments will include Christmas’ own role, but she will stay on the trust board.
“We’re actively seeking partnerships to keep driving conservation forward and we’re committed to continue. We’ve got to keep the vision alive,” she said.
