Wellington - Push Play Outreach
Future focus – ensuring continuing success and independence of the project
Team Leader, Craig Ireson, says “We see SPARC’s Active Communities funding as a start-up fund. At this stage, in the second year of a three year investment – we are looking at how we position ourselves within the council structure. We are doing this by aligning our work with the Council’s Long Term Community Council Plan (LTCCP) and by making our work functional with the relevant business units in council”.
This kind of approach aims to use recreation to add value to council programmes in other areas. For example, by delivering community input and information to support decision making in other areas, such as with Push Play Outreach’s involvement in a safety audit at Central Park Flats (inner city Wellington). The aim of the Push Play Outreach involvement was to find out what recreational opportunities youth in the community were interested in, and where and how the council should invest to provide these opportunities. To help achieve this, Push Play Outreach put on a barbeque and ran games and activities with the young people. The barbeque was an unconventional way of bringing together different council objectives – one around safety at the flats and the other around providing recreational opportunities for young people in the area.
The aim of this approach is to make Push Play Outreach an advocate for recreation, and to use recreation to support a range of council goals. At the same time, Push Play Outreach is becoming a link between the council’s high-level strategists and planners and the people at street-level in the community.
Other strategies to ensure continuity of the programme include identifying and up-skilling people in communities who are likely to be good youth leaders/managers, and who are keen to learn more. In doing this, Push Play Outreach is helping to meet the expectation of the council as a resource for supporting development of community initiatives around sports and recreation.
To find out more about the project, contact Anja Stoldt,
anja.stoldt@wcc.govt.nz, 04 801 4359
Updated | 07 Mar 2008.
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