Twenty-two per cent of what you give pays salaries
Wetland restoration in the Brahmaputra valley, with the overhead figure on the front page rather than in a footnote of an annual report.
Twelve years, counted both ways
A two per cent overhead is a warning, not a boast
Every organisation in this sector is asked what proportion of a donation reaches the work, and the honest answer is never the one that sounds best. Ours is that twenty-two per cent pays salaries, rent and the accounts — and that this is what makes the other seventy-eight per cent competent rather than well-meaning. A charity claiming a two per cent overhead is either being funded by somebody else for its running costs or is not paying anybody properly, and both are worth knowing before you give.
Three things we actually do
All of them slow, and none of them photogenic in the first two years.
Clearing and replanting
Removing water hyacinth and replanting native species around beel margins. It is manual, it takes three seasons before anything looks different, and it is where most of the money and almost all of the volunteer hours go.
Working with the villages
Every site belongs to somebody, and restoration that ignores the households fishing and grazing there fails within a year. Most of our first season on any site is conversation rather than work.
Measuring, including the failures
Water quality, bird counts and vegetation surveys twice a year, published whether or not they are encouraging. Three of our eleven sites have not recovered and the surveys are why we can say so.
From volunteers and partners
The first year at Deepor felt like nothing was happening because nothing was. They told us that in advance, which is why most of us came back for the second one.
They spent a whole season talking to us before touching the water. Two organisations before them started work in the first month and neither is still here.
I gave because the overhead number was on the front page. Every other charity I looked at made me hunt through a PDF for it, and two of them I never found it at all.
The work is manual and the seasons are long
Volunteering here means a day of clearing hyacinth in the heat, not a photograph. Most people come once; the ones who come back are the reason eight sites recovered.
Get involved
Volunteering, giving, partnering, or telling us about a wetland that is in trouble. The last of those is the most useful thing on this list and the one people hesitate over.