KNYSNA NEWSFLASH - Thirty-one years ago Julie Gosling and Hanlie van Niekerk started Action Ads, housed in what was little more than an outhouse behind the old Jimmy’s Café on Knysna’s Main Street. 

They were just a two-women band, with some capital from Julie’s mother, and a lot of passion and determination.

From that small beginning, when every Wednesday the two of them worked right through the night to get the paper on the streets by Thursday morning, they now employ 12 people full time and 14 part-time.

Through the years Action Ads has become so much more than a job creator: it has become part of Knysna’s fabric in many different and positive ways, not the least of which is donating many, many hundreds of thousands of rands into the community over the years, particularly into the underprivileged areas. 

Some of these include sponsoring a variety of sporting events, teams and equipment; paying the unemployed to do long-term cleanup programmes in public places; paying school fees; and funding infrastructure development in many poorer schools and crèches.

Not many know about this side of Action Ads. 

Julie and Hanlie do their good deeds quietly without fanfare, motivated not by getting good publicity for their business, but by their innate generosity, big hearts, and belief in helping their fellow human beings where they can.

Read more in Thursday's Knysna-Plett Herald, as well as online.

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