Welcome to another year at Te Hōnonga a Iwi. Thank you for being an important part of our journey.
We report our actions and outcomes to ensure we hold ourselves accountable for our sustainable development claims. Te Hōnonga a Iwi’s model was designed to be replicable and scalable, so monthly reports offer insight into our processes, our weaknesses and what has worked for us.
All our information is purposefully accessible and able to be used if groups find our resources helpful. We strive to support iwi, the SME, NGO, community and sports sectors to generate a united, amplified response to mitigate climate change, increase local biodiversity, increase individual wellbeing and community health and leverage commercial resilience.
This year, we hit the ground running! With our partner, Ngāti Whātua’s blessing and support from key stakeholders; Auckland Council, UWEN and Untangled Landscapes, we are well on our way to becoming an incorporated society with charitable status. Membership within the committee is near full. We are seeking members with commercial experience and links to the corporate sector, ecological or community development experience as well as rangatahi and Pasifika leadership. Please email Nicky on hello@restoringrosedalepark.org.nz to express your interest if you would like to become an inaugural committee member.
The 26 different varieties of pest plants that have historically thrived in this part of Rosedale Park for 70 years or found they quite like the park ambience as we have cleared land, are unforgiving. We look forward to wrestling back control and readying ourselves for an epic 2025 where we’ll focus on maintaining the new native plantings across the 2022, 23 and 24 sites, clear and plant the apex site with Fulton Hogan leading the way, plant the chicken clearance site, and start clearing the 2026 planting zone.
Around the corner at the community food garden, we aim to secure funds and materials to complete the build with the Dingle Foundation and begin pest-free composting capacity at the garden. The garden will have a wheelchair friendly glass house, shade house, shed and large water storage capacity with irrigation.
We have restoration working bees throughout the week for student leaders, schools, community groups and businesses. On numerous Saturday morning’s, from 10am to 12pm. we work at the restoration situated at the lower carpark at Hilton Brown Swimming. Parking is available on the street or at the National Hockey Centre Gate A. No parking is allowed at Hilton Brown Swimming. On Sundays we work at the food garden from 2pm to 4pm with parking available Gate A, National Hockey Centre, 159 Bush Road.
The following dates are when we look forward to seeing you at the restoration for Saturday community working bees March 1,15,29. April 5. May 3, 17, 31. June 14, 21 (Matariki planting). July 19. Aug 2, 16, 30. Sept 13. Oct 11. Nov 1,15, 29. The dates we are keen to welcome you at the Community Food Garden March 2, 26 and 30. April 6. May 4, 18. June 1, 22 (Matariki). July 20. Aug 3, 17, 31. Sept 14. Oct 12. Nov 2, 16, 30. Dec 14.
Other actions we have taken since December 2024 include:
- We are in the process of applying for funding support to complete the infrastructure development of the food garden. We are looking for partners who invest in the project through donating a 3m by 2m shed (with guttering for water collect!), materials to build a shade house (preferably durable and recycled), a glasshouse, outdoor seating and worktable, two 25,000 litre water tanks, trellis, irrigation equipment, and a solar pump. If you can offer any of the above, particularly if it is in excellent condition but second hand, please contact us.
- We have requested consideration of another funding partnership to develop our legacy project (community food garden) with BUPA and NZ Landcare Trust. We welcomed the team back to site this month and look forward to ongoing connections with BUPA and the trust.
- We are seeking a long-term partner who can supply or sponsor organic vegetable seeds – we would invite you to become a key stakeholder in the project.
- North Harbour Hockey sequestered 2000kg onsite organic waste to convert to compost
- Study days have been undertaken to learn how to develop a community food garden
- 12 new community volunteers and 7 new businesses have contacted us to offer service and skills though the website
- Our plant growth and survival team, Ceinwen and Selma, undertook their annual survey at three out of five of our measurement sites. The data is reported back to Trees that Count and uploaded to our Teams platform.
- Our writers Sheryl Blythen, Fareh and Shaleen have produced five new stories to kick start our year. We welcome new youth leader Alex to the team. This team is doing incredible work showcasing businesses and individuals who have a high impact on our project outcomes.
- We wish to give a massive shout out to youth leader Fareh Farhan from Rangitoto College. His journalism work is extraordinary, and we hope he considers a career in communications. Please do enjoy reading his pieces across the next few months as well as those by Shaleen who is new to Auckland and already giving back to the community with her journalism role. Special thanks to Sheryl who is coaching the new leaders.
- Our trapping lead, Elouise, is now our part-time working bee coordinator. Elouise monitored the trapline across the two-month period and looks forward to training new leaders as well as welcoming back the team from their school break. Thank you, Elouise and Louis, UWEN Pest manager, for covering the project while others had a break.
- Three more feral cats have been caught across the summer break, assessed and managed. While it is disheartening to see new litters in the area, with 17 feral cats being caught for assessment by a vet in two years, we imagine what impacts may have occurred without managing them. The cats are in poor nutritional health, often nursing injuries or lost teeth. Life in the bush is far from easy for them.
- East Coast Bays Lions Club has kindly pledged $500 to support the project, we thank Chris and the team for their investment
- We continue to attend the regional ecology network strategy and operations team meetings to learn, receive support and guidance and hands on expertise which we continue to appreciate and benefit from. Thank you UWEN!
- Our water quality team has continued to undertake monthly water assessments and report their findings.
- Nicholas Mayne found Banded Kokopu, an endemic NZ freshwater fish, in the upper reaches of Alexander Stream this summer! This is such great news and one of the reasons iwi asked us to start improving the water quality of the stream. With inanga, Banded Rail and Banded Kokopu nearby, we can look forward to supporting their health and survival.
- The community garden has been harvested and weeded across the break. We discovered that the hockey turf sprinklers do offer the garden vegetables some water. As such the lettuces, tomatoes, marrow, and herbs all reached maturity and were harvested.
- Steve, from business investor Brightstar managed the kikuyu growth around the garden and spent four hours checking and clearing paper wasp nests.
- Inground wasp nests have been notably bad for the restoration this year with five inground nests that required Auckland Council support to exterminate.
- Tania Bromley, Diabetes NZ, continues to help us learn how to grow vegetables. We appreciate her expertise and the shared resources she offers.
- Park Ranger Theo Jaycox and Nicky Shave met with Troy, lead at Fulton Hogan, to discuss starting on land clearance of the apex in March 2025. The site is heavily infested with weeds and wild cats are present.
- Moss Cao, PhD researcher, has received community garden soil samples for testing to ensure food produced in the garden is safe to grow and consume
- The Settlers team, especially Bill and Margaret, has staked the seed whakapapa seedlings that were handed over by the Year 2 Kristin team, and will for the home-grown native nursery across summer until Matariki 2025
- TANI featured our Chinese representative, IT guru and interpreter in their newsletter. Ashley has moved to Australia, but remains committed to support Te Hōnonga a Iwi as we grow. We really appreciate her loyalty and willingness to continue work from afar.
- Ashley, Samantha Weston, graphic designer and Cadey Korson, academic, Massey University, are examples of how great people can contribute immense value restoring nature and mitigating climate change without working at the site. A large portion of the value we create to secure outcomes comes from professionals or passionate people investing their expertise in meaningful ways. If you know of people who you feel could help us improve our offerings or scale at pace, please consider asking them to get in touch. Many gifted hands create innovative, diverse solutions.
- Cadey and her whānau come to plant a native for their little one, Kina, while they were back from America. Cadey is continuing to produce the year-long documentary on Te Hōnonga a Iwi’s social value chain. Partnering with primary, secondary and tertiary education institutions is essential for our restoration project to ensure we generate new knowledge of our methods and analyse the impacts of our practices.
- We welcome Dr Stanley Frielick, Senior Lecturer, Te Ara Poutama Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Development, AUT, to our newly formed committee. We are delighted to have the opportunity to work alongside Stanley and celebrate having the chance to improve what we do with his extensive knowledge and skills in teaching and learning and innovation in teaching environmental science.
- Mountains to Sea Freshwater ecologists Amy and Rhianon have carved out new and exciting opportunities for us to increase our understanding of how we can improve freshwater quality within the O te Ha catchment. Having access to their expertise, resources and support is of high value to the restoration. Thank you, Mountains, to Sea.
- We thank UWEN for their ongoing work to support generating increased capacity to ensure we restore and maintain the whenua. UWEN links in corporate volunteers and cultural groups who wish to invest in nature.
- We have welcomed two student groups visiting from Japan and China to Te Hōnonga a Iwi and enjoyed the chance to understand what interests these students while we worked alongside them. Overwhelmingly the students fed back that they feel they ‘can breathe easily here’, the people are kind and nice and they wish they could live in such a green place
- We are grateful we can profile our place at Ecofest this year and hope you’ll join us for the working bees through Ecofest!
- We had opportunity to seek funding support for traps through Forest and Bird NZ. The trap programme is easy to register for and has potential to bring in donations to fund new traps.
- Kevin O’Leary, CEO, Business North Harbour, continues to offer Te Hōnonga a Iwi networking support to scale. Our latest request for business help generated three new business offers to work at the site. We recommend restorations develop a relationship with their nearest BID leaders to enable opportunity for the commercial sector to invest in restoring the environment they are dependent on. Huge thanks Kevin for your time and energy.
- We experienced some undesirable behaviour from a member of the public recently. With help from Auckland Council, we have adjusted our health and safety plans to ensure we mitigate risk. All leaders who might be impacted have been notified of the incident and we ask that you always work in pairs when undertaking your role. If you have any concerns, please contact Nicky on hello@restoringrosedalepark.org.nz.
- We have written references for two of our youth leaders this month. Supporting our youth to apply for experiential leadership opportunities or employment is one of our top priorities. The service skills and knowledge students accumulate with us has resulted in three young people being employed through their relationship with Te Hōnonga a Iwi, which is pleasing and a result we envisage for all our people.
- We have reached out to AUT and Auckand University contacts requesting the university work in partnership with the restoration leads to support students undertaking their Masters or PhD’s. Some of the research projects we have requested consideration of include:
· Measuring carbon sequestration within soil in urban regeneration projects
· Generating a novel native or non-invasive exotic urban, edible, fire-resistant cover crop that enables land or freshwater regeneration without the use of sprays or commercial fertilizers
· The use of IT or technology to support regenerating corridors of land across the urban ecosystem
· Measure the efficacy of increasing soil health by inoculating soil with regenerative microbiome at regular intervals
· The use of drones for dropping native seed bombs along urban corridors to strengthen native biodiversity
· Measure freshwater bio aquatic diversity in real time with a fish door and citizen science
· Measure the efficacy of using regenerative agriculture to regenerate native bush in the urban environment
· Measure the social value of working in nature for people managing neurodiversity and people managing their mental health.
· Measure the small to medium size business impacts of investing in Te Hōnonga a Iwi Restoring Rosedale Park
- We have confirmed our partnership day with Dingle Foundation and look forward to working with the Dingle Team and their corporate sponsors once again to make some magic happen mid-year.
- We have devised a new youth leadership team focusing on mapping, monitoring and recording pest plants at the restoration. In total we have eight new youth leaders from Kristin and Rangitoto College who offered their photography, biology, math and IT skills to enable us to track how our pest plants impact the site and give us opportunity to start managing their presence in more effective efficient ways. Gaining insight in this area is especially important for our restoration given we are bioorganic and do not use herbicides to control pests. We are late to the party, but this team will be instrumental in helping us catch up and do better in this space to enable natives to flourish.
- We have invested time in learning skills to support inclusive community development with interesting workshops run by Auckland Council.
- We welcome Westlake Boys back to the restoration and we thoroughly enjoyed being invited to visit Wilson School to help the students investigate where they might start planting a native tree area on their grounds at Glenfield college. We also sowed harakeke seeds for the students to water across the term. We appreciate their time and willingness to grow native plants for us to plant later this year.
- Olivia, one of our experienced youth leaders is changing her role within the restoration this year. She has taken the role as youth consultant. We will meet with Olivia for 90 mins each quarter. During our time together, we will have the chance to hear her perspectives on increasing diversity and inclusion from a youth lens. Developing greater insight into what youth expect, and need will help the restoration become more resilient and more attractive to our future pipeline of volunteers. We are very thankful to all our young people, who are often busier than most of us, as they continue to carve out time to support our sustainable development. Chris, who cares for our chickens when they are on site, is also trialing a new role as Business Activator. Our students are clever people. Having flex and a range of development opportunities is important to retain our talent and to enable us to offer reciprocity for their service.
- We have had a long dry summer. As such the chickens are yet to return to the site. Untold thanks to Svea @Untangled Landscapes for hosting the chooks at their place until the rain offers greater onsite water security.
- We are grateful to receive 1000 new natives from Trees that Count funding this year. The extra supply will enable us to double our infill efforts, which will support growth and survival and the insect and bird life that will come.
- We are working with Asian Families Trust to understand if we can offer meaningful mental health promotion opportunities within the restoration and the community food garden. We would like one of the raised beds to reflect the foods our Chinese community prefer to eat. And are looking at innovative and improved ways we can work together to support health promotion within our community.
- The Northern Health School has reached out and interested in becoming stakeholders in the project. This is exciting news, and we look forward to developing greater understanding of the needs of young people who are managing mental health challenges with the hope that we can offer a safe, happy place to belong and to contribute to.
- We have welcomed three of our school stakeholders back already and want to take the opportunity to give a massive high-five to the teachers who work above and beyond in partnership with us, and students, to enable students to connect with nature-based service opportunities. We know that conservation volunteers have greater health outcomes regenerating nature. We also know that having meaningful service opportunities is a protective factor for youth mental health.
- Finally, North Harbour Hockey is a case study for Climate Wise, a Titaki Auckland Unlimited initiative to support SMEs to take climate action to support mitigation and adaptation strategies. Te Hōnonga a Iwi is featured in the case study video and will be available to view next week!
For now, we wish you all well in your endeavors and we look forward to working alongside you all as we unite to develop legacies we can be proud of for future generations and the ecosystems they depend upon to survive.
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