Tauranga - City On Its Feet Programme
Future focus – ensuring continuing success and independence of the project
As there is an end point in the project funding, ensuring the project continues to be sustainable is crucial. The key to this is in training volunteers to take on core tasks that currently sit with the programme co-ordinators, and making the programme more cost effective in general.
Cost effective solutions
The programme team are developing more affordable channels and techniques for communicating with the project participants. Some examples of this to date include: increased use of email communications, COIF information is embedded into many Sport BOP public communications (e-news, newspaper articles), which are cost effective tools.
The importance of getting volunteers involved in organising City On Its Feet
Currently, public enquiries are received directly by the project co-ordinators (employed by Sport BOP). The challenge is to transfer the responsibility for handling these enquiries on to the Walking Captains (volunteers). While the initial point of contact will continue to be Sport BOP, the bulk of the labour in progressing the enquires and connecting people with the walking groups needs to move from the project co-ordinators to Walking Captains.
The challenges of getting volunteers involved
To date, it has proven difficult to create an effective way of achieving this transition from an enquiry being made to people actually connecting with a local group. The problem is linked to the lack of popularity of the website which should be a more effective way of allowing volunteers to manage enquiries, rather than the telephone. However, many Tauranga people seem to be more comfortable engaging with someone directly over the phone.
Another challenge in transferring responsibility from the co-ordinators to the volunteers, is that many of the volunteers (Walking Captains) want to have a minimal role, while some may want to be more active. Where Captains want to have a minimal role there is a gap in the management of the group. The degree to which they are willing to take on responsibility varies for a range of reasons.
Updated | 28 Feb 2008.
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