How is your community group or sporting club going?

Whakatāne-Ōhope Community Board is all about community, and we have the privilege of managing a discretionary fund to support community groups, projects and sporting endeavours.

We know times are tough, and sometimes it’s difficult to get events or projects to come to fruition. The community board’s discretionary fund is available to help our community groups through financial hurdles.

Many people aren’t aware that the fund is available, so to encourage greater awareness we wanted to highlight some community initiatives that we recently supported.

Neighbourhood Support is all about community too. It is a nationwide community-led movement that brings people and neighbourhoods together to create safe, resilient, and connected communities.

We recently supported Neighbourhood Support with a small grant to help them with their database system.

The Neighbourhood Support team are passionate about supporting the development of small street-based neighbourhood groups – whether through an annual morning tea, a social BBQ, or by helping create a contact list of neighbours to enable better communication.

This can be especially helpful in emergency management, when elderly people or those with disabilities need someone looking out for them.

It has been a big month for those affected by the events of the Whakaari eruption in 2019.

The fifth anniversary on December 9  was commemorated with a dawn service at The Heads, followed by a very special event coordinated by Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Awa at Te Mānuka Tutahi marae for family, first responders and dignatories.

As a board, we have been working with Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Awa to progress a physical memorial to those who lost their lives in the eruption, which can be a place where our community can gather and remember loved ones.

Our discretionary funding has helped initiate the development of a concept design for the memorial, which is currently being shared with the Whakaari whānau for feedback, then will be shared with hāpu and the community.

This has been an important project for the board to get going. We now have Eastern Bay Community Foundation able to accept donations for the memorial project, which we hope will attract significant external funding.

We also recently supported the Whakatāne Surf Lifesaving Club juniors to help them get to an Australian competition, not to mention the annual Whakatāne January Touch Tournament at Rex Morpeth Park – one of the biggest in Aotearoa and a huge weekend for our town.

Finally, we were delighted to help fund two of our favourite events over the festive season – the Whakatāne Christmas Parade and the Ōhope Lions Club annual book sale. These events are great in bringing our community together, and a great showcase for our town when summer visitors arrive.

On behalf of the Whakatāne-Ōhope Community Board, we wish you a very relaxing and safe festive season, and we look forward to seeing you out and about in our communities in 2025.

Carolyn, Linda, Mark, Chris, Doug and Jahn.