Dozens of families from Auckland’s Dawoodi Bohra community spent a recent Saturday morning knee deep in a West Auckland wetland, planting native seedlings as part of an unusual partnership that pairs a religious community with one of the country’s most celebrated conservation projects.
About 40 community members turned out at Matuku Link, a 37 hectare bush and wetland reserve at Te Henga, near Bethells Beach in the Waitākere Ranges. Among them were parents and young children, including volunteer Nazar Faizy, who came along with his wife Fatema and their seven year old son to help dig in plants and pull weeds. The turnout was the latest working bee in a three year agreement that commits the community to planting thousands of native trees and wetland plants every year.
Under a memorandum of understanding signed in late 2025, the Dawoodi Bohra community of Auckland has pledged to plant 4,000 locally sourced native plants annually, replanting roughly an acre of the reserve and supporting expanded pest control. The work is run through Project Rise, a global Dawoodi Bohra initiative that funds efforts in nutrition, education, environment, health and women’s empowerment around the world.
For Adnan Hasan, president of the Dawoodi Bohras of New Zealand, the appeal lies partly in how rare it is for a faith group to take on hands on conservation. “I think we are unique in a way that we are a religious community coming together for a conservation project,” he told RNZ. Watching the families work, he said the numbers spoke for themselves. “You can see the impact of what 30 or 40 odd families can bring on a morning like today.”
Shabbir Rajkotwala, a trustee and outreach lead for the community, framed the project as a duty that crosses cultural and religious lines. “It is an obligation that everyone has to protect the land we live in regardless of what their background is,” he said. He added that the choice of Matuku Link was deliberate. “We chose this project because it aligns perfectly with our community’s values on protecting nature.”
The reserve takes its name from the matuku-hūrepo, or Australasian bittern, one of New Zealand’s most threatened birds. Fewer than 700 of the secretive, reed dwelling herons are thought to remain in the wild, and some live at Te Henga, described as Auckland’s largest mainland wetland. The bird depends entirely on healthy wetland habitat, the very thing decades of drainage and pest pressure have stripped away across much of the country. Restoring the swamp forest and open water at Matuku Link is meant to give the bittern, along with native fish, frogs and insects, somewhere to hold on.
Matuku Link was founded in 2016, when the Matuku Reserve Trust acquired the land and began revegetating it with eco sourced plants grown in an on site nursery. The aim has always been bigger than a single block. Trustees want to link the reserve with neighbouring conservation projects to create a safe corridor for native plants and animals stretching from the Waitākere Ranges down to the Tasman Sea. The trust also runs an education programme that reaches more than 1,000 primary school children a year, teaching them how wetlands work and why they matter.
That effort has drawn international notice. Matuku Link was recently named a Gold Star winner at the Wetland Link International Awards, one of only three wetlands in the world to receive the honour that year. For a small, volunteer driven trust on the edge of Auckland, the recognition put it in rare company.
Founding trustee Dr John Sumich said the steady support from a community group made a real difference to what the reserve could achieve. “The support from the Dawoodi Bohra community is invaluable,” he said. “Having previously joined us for a planting day, it is truly inspiring to see such efforts from a faith group.”
The Dawoodi Bohra are an Indian Muslim community that follows the Fatimi Ismaili Tayyibi tradition within Shia Islam, with more than a million members spread across some 40 countries. In New Zealand the community is small, numbering around 115 families, but it has been part of the country for close to five decades. Joining children and grandparents on a planting day, organisers say, is a way of putting down roots of a different kind.
The partnership runs for three years, which means many of the seedlings planted this autumn will still be knitting into the wetland long after the agreement ends. Native plants are slow growing, and the corridor the trust imagines will take far longer than any single pledge to complete. But on a damp morning at Te Henga, with families spread across a muddy paddock and trays of seedlings emptying one by one, the long game looked a little more achievable.
What do you make of community and faith groups stepping in to restore New Zealand’s wetlands? Have you taken part in a planting day near you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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