Our news feed is often full of photos of volunteers on tasks or young people out learning on the river but it if often easy to forget just how much works goes into keeping the Water of Leith healthy, so we have crunched the numbers from last financial year.
In 2023.4 we delivered 249 practical tasks (4.8 per week), often focused on litter picking, river clean-ups, path work, maintenance, invasive species management, these also include gardening sessions, meadow management and biological surveys.
At the centre and along the river we also delivered 172 Learning Sessions (3.3 per week), over 3700 participants on school sessions, group visits and events . We welcomed a record 39 classes from Edinburgh’s High Schools.
Our Visitor Centre is also staffed by a wonderful team of volunteers, this year our community cafe really took off with soup and games on Friday and in the spring home baking was on offer. We welcomed 20,312 visitors to centre over all.
Finally the hidden hero’s are the Patrol team – keeping a watchful eye on the river, recording activity and reporting issues so we can plan our task – they conducted 334 patrols.
In total we supported 11,040 volunteer hours (220 hours per week, like 7 full time members of staff)
