Two million steps in a month!

How Bradgate members earned enough to plant 120 planet-saving mangrove trees

Four of the five Bradgate Old Oaks team... Cees, Linda, Maggie and Adrian. The fifth member, Sue, was busy when the photo was taken... walking somewhere no doubt!

One of the joys of belonging to an organisation of nearly 1.2 million minds is that someone, somewhere, will come up with an innovative idea.

That’s what led to five Bradgate Rotary members Adrian Walker, Sue Pontefract, Maggie Daulby, Linda Thompson and Cees Valk paying more attention than usual to the number of steps they took each day in March. The steps were recorded on their cellphones with a specially-created app reporting their progress to the Treekly Challenge organisers. By walking at least 5,000 steps for at least five days a week, the ‘Bradgate Old Oaks’ walkers collectively put in enough steps to plant 120 mangrove trees for project Mteza Creek in Kenya.

Rotary International President Shekhar Mehta had highlighted the importance of mangrove trees and at COP26 declared that mangrove restoration will become one of the key threads of Rotary's environmental focus.

The daily walks undertaken by thousands of Rotary members internationally can help our physical and mental health, combat climate change, and help create livelihoods for people living in extreme poverty, educating and empowering them to restore and protect forests on a massive scale. Restoring our forests helps offset carbon emissions. Twenty trees a month captures 1,000kg of CO2 and is climate positive.

The ‘Bradgate Old Oaks’ completed well over two million steps collectively during the month of March, came fourth in the Leader board and three of the team were in the top 20 out of 130 participants.. In Great Britain and Ireland, Rotarians are trying to reach an annual target of planting five million trees, which would offset 500,000 flights from London to New York.

Maggie Daulby, one of the Bradgate Old Oaks team said: “It started as increasing our steps as much as possible each day to turn steps into trees. Some days it got quite competitive but we had great fun and worked really well together as a team”.

For more information, use the button on this page to contact Maggie, or visit: https://www.treekly.org/rotary-gbi