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Tarryn Johnston

Reviving the Hennops river

Tarryn Johnston at the Hennops River © Thom Pierce 2023

The way that other people talk about Tarryn Johnston is a better indication than any other of her passion for cleaning up the Hennops River. Their faces crease into a smile and they say something like “That woman is incredible”. 


It is Tarryn’s focused intention about her mission to clean up the waterways and the generosity with which she encourages others along on that journey, that brings people to this conclusion. 


“We don’t have time to sit around and point fingers…I clean rivers. It’s a popular misconception that it is someone else's job.”


In 2018, Tarryn’s life was in a very different place. She was on a mission to end the abusive relationships that had shaped her life, embarking on an introspective journey through prayer and meditation. During one of the workshops that she attended, the facilitator identified that she owed a debt to the ocean and this started her on the journey to the realisation of her responsibility towards the environment, specifically water. 


In 2019 her twelve-year-old daughter asked her if she could help with a river cleanup project and she jumped at the chance. Tarryn had no idea that this was just the beginning of her healing.


On seeing the black, sludgy water she was horrified by the dangerous levels of pollution in the rivers near her home in Centurian, Gauteng. She committed to organising a river cleanup every two weeks and, once she realised that she needed money to do so, she started a not-for-profit company. 


Over the next few years, extreme weather and Covid 19 distracted from the river clean-up operation, and Tarryn busied herself with emergency flood responses and the sheltering of homeless people during the pandemic. 


But the Hennops River Revival has continued to grow, and through Tarryns positive determination she now has funding, and a team of 12 people who clean up the river 3 days a week. 


It’s her ability to bring people together that is so enviable. She has a good relationship with the local government, something that she says comes from not pointing fingers of blame but from offering partnerships and solutions. She also has several big corporates that fund small projects through their CSI initiatives which means that she is single-handedly doing the work of several corporate departments.


There is also the acknowledgement that this job will never end and that she will never clean up the Hennops in her lifetime. But that’s all part of being an Actionist for Tarryn, taking on the work for the benefit of future generations. 



CREATED FOR positive activism © 2025

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