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South Canterbury Neighbourhood Support
South Canterbury Neighbourhood Support has continued to work across the Timaru, Waimate and Mackenzie Districts with all the challenges that Covid-19 and flooding has brought.
It is great to see that New Zealand has shown, once again, that we are a resilient community of five million who can work well together to keep our communities safe places to live. It’s all about looking out for one another!
Our co-ordinator has continued to developed and strengthen connections and relationships with our many members, volunteers, our 340 street groups, partner organisations and funders.
Despite some cancellations due to Covid 19 during the summer months, we still managed to get our promotional stand out and about to a good number of large public events to meet as many people in our communities and neighbourhoods as we could, and we are thankful to Timaru District Council and Alpine Energy for sponsoring prizes of Grab and Go kits and First Aid kits in our popular free prize draws.
The Mackenzie Highland A&P Show was a highlight where we joined the eleven support agencies and organisations who worked together to establish a ‘Community Support Village’ to share advice, information and support in a fun way to help keep our communities safe, resilient and connected.
We have been successful in our fundraising efforts too and we must thank the Lotteries Community Fund, Pub Charity, COGS, Timaru District Council Civil Defence, the Aoraki Foundation, Neighbourhood Support NZ and the Community Trust of Mid & South Canterbury for their generous support which has enabled us to continue to provide support, resources and information to our members and volunteers, and support to run our community driven projects.
As a charity we rely on the support of our funders and partner organisations like the Police. Without their help we would not be celebrating another successful year.
Last year we were delighted that our co-ordinator, Betty-Ann, was elected as the Neighbourhood Support Canterbury District representative and also elected to the national board.
This has developed and strengthened our links to Canterbury Neighbourhood Support colleagues and national staff.
This year we were delighted to have winners in the national Neighbourhood Support NZ awards.
The winners were:
• Champion – Graham Dellow, an amazing
Timaru street group volunteer for over 20 years • Partner – ‘Aoraki Connect’ in partnership with Multicultural Aoraki and funded by the Aoraki Foundation, where we now have 18 diverse volunteers who welcome and support newcomers in their neighbourhood • Project – The Rural Crime Prevention
Project with our Police colleagues. Our Shop Safe project continues to thrive where more than 100 local retailers look out for one another and offer support and help to prevent retail crime.
We ran four Burglary Prevention Pack give away sessions with our local Police partners which proved popular with our members.
The Tagline Project with our Community Patrol partners is still going strong. We have worked together with volunteers over a number of years to identify, clean and record over 1,000 graffiti tags in the Timaru District.
It is good to note that locally, in South Canterbury, we have experienced growth in our community-led project areas, membership, volunteers, face book followers and partnerships.
We hope this continues far into the future to continue to raise awareness in the prevention and preparedness space and to create safe, resilient and connected neighbourhoods and communities.
