Giving back to community
JOBURG - Sue Retallack gives back to her community by keeping it clean.
Sue Retallack is one of the founding member of Clean Village, a non-profit organisation that cleans the streets of Kensington.
“My journey of being one of the three founding members of Clean Village began about a year before the company was started with my own determination to clean up our once beautiful suburb,” said Retallack.
She began by removing illegal posters that were nailed on to trees, cable-tied to stop signs and robots and wired on to street light poles.
“I would drive around the suburb until my boot was full and then I would take them to the Bezuidenhout Valley dump. I slowly started to see that fewer of these signs were being replaced, but I didn’t give up,” she said.
“It was really hard work. I would often get encouraging hoots from passing motorists and pedestrians, who would stop to chat to me. The soul-destroying thing was that once a mini-substation was cleaned it only stayed that way until the guys came back again. I started covering the boxes with grease once they were cleaned which meant that those stickers would no longer stick,” said Retallack.
Retallack said she had a vision for a cleaner and better Kensington, “We decided it was time to stop talking and time to take action.”
Retallack said the vision was to create opportunities for the community by employing three people who are currently keeping Kensington clean, she added that she wished she could employ more people. “We would love to expand at some point to include Troyeville and Malvern to uplift the whole area and create more job opportunities for fellow South Africans,” she concluded.
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