Shark Spotters can fly their flags high after getting an award from the Community Chest.
The organisation, which is funded by the City of Cape Town and Save our Seas Foundation, won in the category of Social Innovation in Environment and Conservation.
The award carries both public recognition and a
R50 000 cash reward.
Fifteen organisations were fêted for creative solutions to public needs, during the awards ceremony at the Artscape theatre.
The annual Community Chest Impumelelo Social Innovations Awards (CCISIA) programme recognises socially conscious innovators who conceive, design and build sustainable responses to social challenges in health, education, infrastructure and housing, culture and arts, environment and conservation, income-generation, community development and social entrepreneurship.
All nine provinces submitted applications.
Community Chest CEO Lorenzo Davids CEO said: “Our dream for these
awards is to provide a platform for innovation, deep thinking, social intelligence and impact in a space that so desperately needs to see fresh ideas and have deep thinkers who work collaboratively with civil society.”
Shark Spotters CEO Sarah Waries said they were thrilled with the award.
“We feel it is brilliant recognition of the hard work the spotters do and how important the spotting programme is for the beaches around Cape Town.”
The R50 000 would be a “huge help” to the Shark Spotters.
“We will be using it to continue the work that we doing – we have some great training coming up for next year and we are planning to do
some tour guiding training with the Spotters and some communication training and then the normal medical first aid training as well.”
She added: “We are very grateful to Community
Chest and also very grateful to the Shark Spotters
team for the brilliant work that they do on a daily
basis that often goes unnoticed.”
Even with low shark activity, the team was still busy, not only shark spotting but also rendering other services, such as first aid, she
said.