Active Canterbury
What is the Project?
Active Canterbury aims to help people in Canterbury become more active more often. The project, launched in August 2007, delivers a range of innovative tools and resources to achieve this goal. These include a website, which is a one-stop shop for the general public, and providing physical activity professionals and health professionals with information and resources aimed at getting people more active.
The website includes:
- an “easy promotion” tool, which provides online poster templates for cost effective and slick promotions design for local events under the Active Canterbury brand www.activecanterbury.org.nz/PhysicalActivityProfessionals
- a database of physical activity opportunities in the greater Christchurch region, including Banks Peninsula and Waimakariri. (This database was first established as part of Community Information Christchurch, or CINCH, and was developed by Christchurch City Libraries)
- evaluation resources to enable physical activity providers to carry out easy impact evaluation of their programmes. These resources show whether people taking part in a programme are more active following participation.
In addition to the website, boxed resources (in the form of Active Canterbury toolkits) have been produced for physical activity providers and health professionals. Visit the Active Canterbury website www.activecanterbury.org.nz to learn more about what is in these toolkits.
These toolkits and the website are being delivered alongside a public awareness campaign.
In order for this project to work, successful collaboration between a range of partners across the Canterbury region has been essential. Now that the project is up and running, the key challenge is to increase awareness and use of the resources by both the public and physical activity and health professionals.
Key Partners in the Project
The Active Canterbury project is a partnership between diverse organisations across the region. The project manager, hosted by Christchurch City Council, facilitates the partnership and is responsible for delivery of the operational aspects of the project. The project manager is guided and supported by a project steering group, who are the decision-making team, and the governance group.
Key players in this exciting project include Sport and Recreation New Zealand (SPARC), and members of the Canterbury Inter-sectorial Physical Activity and Nutritional Group (CIPANG). This group includes a range of organisations associated with the Canterbury District Health Board, several local territorial authorities, Primary Health Organisations and non-governmental organisations. For a more comprehensive list see www.activecanterbury.org.nz/AboutUs
Christchurch City Council is the local authority most involved in the project on a day-to-day basis. Selwyn District Council has a new team member (SPARC funded) to help activate the project in their district. They will be working closely with local providers to ensure there is a good uptake of project resources and tools.
Consideration is currently being given to how to extend the project or project parts to other local authorities in the Canterbury region and beyond. To assist in this process, Active Canterbury is happy to share the branding, strategy, design, advertising and tools with other organisations. For example, the easy promotion tool could easily be adapted by the developer (Synapsys NZ Limited).
In addition to providing funding through the Active Communities programme, SPARC has been involved as a project partner at various stages of the project cycle. This includes:
- supporting the project steering group in getting the application together
- providing advice at steering group meetings and to the governance group, and chairing a meeting during a key phase in the project
- getting the Active Canterbury logo added to the Push Play advertisements in the region
- linking to Active Canterbury through the SPARC website.
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Updated | 25 Jul 2008.
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