Voluntary organisations often lose their early history, and the genesis by which they came about, to the vagaries of time and the continual movement of people through the organisation. The norm is that the early history is recorded only orally, passed on and mutating like Chinese whispers, rarely supported and verified by more than a modicum of written material.
The early rustlings in the undergrowth that led to the eventual formal creation of the Ōpāwaho Heathcote River Network were in 2013. That an account of the formation process from that time until its formal foundation in 2017 has been written by one closely involved in it, and with access to most of the papers that were created at the time, means that we are in that small proportion of organisations whose roots are well-recorded.