Creating change in a time of crisis

A message from the Trash Hero co-founder, Roman Peter:

As the scale and severity of the Covid-19 pandemic became clear in early March, our immediate priority was to make sure our hundreds of volunteers and communities were safe. Our network is global and then – as now – every country was responding differently to the threat of the virus. On 13 March, we issued simple guidelines and a risk assessment tool to all chapters to help them to decide whether to carry on activities and how to proceed in a safe manner if they did.

We were also proactive in putting on hold all travel arrangements and accommodation bookings for our Southeast Asian family meetings that were due to be held in April – our biggest and costliest events of the year. These precautions meant that when we eventually made the decision to cancel, we did not lose a single dollar of your donated funds.

During the lockdown period, we have not been able to carry on “business as usual.” All programmes have been temporarily suspended, in line with government restrictions. Instead, we have focused on supporting our volunteers with frequent communication and interaction: keeping our network engaged will be key to getting up and running again quickly once it is safe to do so.

As an already lean organisation we have been able to contain the immediate impact on our finances. We took further steps to minimise our costs; reprioritise and redistribute work; and harness additional volunteer power through our existing networks. In this way, we have been able to retain all of our current staff. Below we go into some of these measures in more detail.

Together with the reserves we started to build in 2018, and the unfaltering commitments of foundations and individuals for the current year, we are confident that we will weather this storm.
However the long term financial future remains uncertain. More than ever we rely on your support to continue with our work.

ACTIVITIES

• All community-based activities (Action & Awareness, Trash Hero Kids’ programme) stopped from late March; the bottle programme also effectively shut down as refill point businesses closed.
• We have been creating new content to encourage waste reduction activities that can be done solo or at home, for example this Trash Hero Kids video:

• We have been keeping people up to date with the latest information about corona and reusables, and issues around medical waste
• We are currently organising online workshops / leaders’ academy / family meetings and taking this opportunity to include chapters in countries who previously had not been able to join
• As restrictions ease in different countries, a few cleanups are restarting, in compliance with local safety regulations
• Many volunteers have been hit hard personally by the crisis, especially those in Southeast Asia, where tourist income has disappeared overnight and there is little to no government support. It is possible we lose some chapters as a result. We are however doing everything possible (aside from providing financial aid) to ensure morale is kept up and to remind everyone they will always be part of the “Trash Hero Family.”

From left / top: Trash Hero Tachov motivated people to do solo cleanups with #oneplaceonehero; Trash Hero Adelaide organised “group” cleanups with everyone going out separately; Trash Hero Tumapel did home schooling with the Trash Hero Kids book

FINANCES

• Careful planning ensured no existing funds were lost due to the pandemic
• Individual / spontaneous donations have almost completely dried up since March
• We expect earned income from events, partnerships etc. to be significantly impacted
• The majority of our major donors are honouring their commitments for 2020, for which we are very grateful
• We are equally grateful for any flexibility from grant-makers on obligations and timelines
• We currently have funds to cover 7 months of operation and we have a further 4 months’ funds held in our reserves.
• Salaries across the network (4 full time positions) are covered until November this year
• There is no doubt we will be ready to start activities as soon as we are able. But reserves will be depleted so funds are needed to make up the loss
• Our existing budget and targets for this year will be revised down by an estimated 50%. We cannot yet provide a final calculation as the situation is still changing. However as growth and spending decrease concurrently, we expect our impact per dollar to remain roughly the same.

MANAGEMENT

• We provided guidance to all volunteers within 48 hours of the pandemic being declared in March
• Our global teams were already remote working, so no time or resources were lost in adapting to “work from home”
• With reduced daily business, we have been able to carry out much needed consolidation of programmes and infrastructure
• This has created a lot of new work focused on long term capacity building. Our staff have been flexible and adapted quickly to the new routines
• Our core volunteer network has been affected in different ways: some people have needed a break to focus on their personal situation, while others have been able to offer more time as they are staying at home. Overall, we have continued to cover significant translation and administrative tasks with pro bono contributions.

From left / top: Reduce food waste with Trash Hero World; stay home with Trash Hero Indonesia; learn how to upcycle with Trash Hero Kuwait

COMMUNICATION

• Since the start of the crisis, we have stayed in constant communication with our volunteer network
• We continue to post on social media and have issued guidelines for chapters to do the same
• We monitor our social media network (200+ accounts) for misinformation or inappropriate posting about the virus, as well as for positive and creative posts to share
• We have built a Southeast Asia operations team to facilitate two way communication
• We have made good progress on our volunteer intranet

As the economic climate becomes more challenging over the coming months, Trash Hero will be needed more than ever to keep the focus on plastic reduction at the grassroots. We have already seen the plastic industry start to capitalise on people’s fears over hygiene, by pushing for more single use products and packaging, or trying to overturn plastic bans in various locations around the world.

It is important that the impact of our work thus far is not lost in this hiatus. Our communities are depending on us – and you – to continue our activities. And, despite the uncertainty, there are great opportunities for change offered by this crisis. As life begins again, we can help shape the “new normal” to reflect our shared vision of a world without waste. The Trash Hero hope and spirit is still strong and, with your ongoing support, we can continue to make a difference.