Supporting our communities

Posted by Frana Cardno on 23 July 2009 | 0 Comments

Tags: lotteries, taskforce, ALIVE, holiday

I have seen the inside of planes frequently in the past few weeks as I spent two days last week in Wellington for the Lotteries Community Facilities Fund meeting and then again this week for Mayors' Taskforce.

Both of these were very interesting in very different ways. I was surprised at the lack of applications to the Lotteries Community Facilities Fund from Southland. The fund is a fantastic way to get a great start for a community facility and I strongly encourage any community which is looking at building any facility to apply to this fund.

The Mayors' Taskforce group talked a lot about the loss of funding for some of our key youth projects and although we had already won the battle for funding for Southland's ALIVE programme, there are other worthwhile projects that are going to lose out with the cuts.

The Mayors' Taskforce has been working hard for some years now to support our youth throughout New Zealand and has felt strongly prevention is better than being the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.  We will continue to fight for funding and for our youth.

I have also had two very enjoyable events to go to in Te Anau, the first being the opening of the new church and the second the Fire Brigade's honours evening. Both celebrated the community and volunteers in different ways and both organisations play an important role in the community.

I also opened the new session for the ALIVE programme at Te Koawa Turoa Lodge last week, and this is a part of my role as Mayor that I particularly enjoy. Seeing the young people at the beginning of the programme and then seeing how they change by the end gives me a great deal of satisfaction about my involvement in this.

I am off to the sunshine for a couple of weeks so Deputy Mayor Jim Copland will be writing the next column.  I am really looking forward to this trip as it is the first time all our grandchildren will be together in one place so that is going to be wonderful.