Sustainability and Community Resilience Committee 2019-22

At the end of the last meeting of the committee on June 1 2022, I gave a brief overview of the committee's work and thanks to those who had assisted. Here are my (filled out) notes:

"I'd like to acknowledge that this is the last committee for Sustainability and Community Resilience meeting and like to share a couple of thoughts on it:

We've had 19 meetings since November 2019 – some gaps in the schedule due to the extended covid interruptions in 2020 as well as breaks for the long term and annual plan hearings.

We had very broad terms of reference. This has meant that for the most part we have been reactive to reports arriving for decisions, although there are some specific areas, such as Social Housing, that we have been pro-active in a more in depth oversight in the first few months. In that space we also oversaw the development of the Community Housing Strategy, adopted last year, which asks staff to take a broader look at housing within the city, to not only help meet the needs for social housing, but innovative models in partnership with others. The work we have done with OCHT this term to enable a faster mover to warmer drier homes and to rebuild our social housing has been excellent – but there is still a lot that needs doing.

Work programme highlights include Kia Tūroa te Ao the Climate Resilience Strategy, establishing the Sustainability Fund for climate change related community initiatives, establishing the Intangible Heritage fund to sit alongside the Heritage Incentive Grants and covers a gap in the implementation of the Heritage Strategy.

We also oversaw the review of the Strengthening Communities strategy which had not been done for many years and now better reflects our role as an organisation in community connection and wellbeing.

We’ve had the responsibility for making decisions on a significant amount of community funding over the term, funding allocated to protect heritage and support the arts, to act on climate change, to boost community connections and resilience and to make our city a more interesting, attractive and vibrant place to live.

In the more proactive space governance-wise we have also instituted new reporting for our community facing areas and the reports have had excellent feedback from councillors and the Community. These have been new this term and have involved much more transparent reporting on the work of the Parks Unit, our Libraries, the Art Gallery, our Recreation and Sports Unit.

Making sure that the decisions made by the committee that are not yet complete are transferred into the system and to any new committee will be really important so that work on these is not lost and community expectations are met.

And I’d like to end with some thanks to Cr Coker for being a thoughtful and active deputy, ready to step into the chair when needed too. Also, to Cr Johanson for his work chairing the funding sub-committee.

Thanks to the staff that have helped out, especially Simone, our incredibly able and astute committee advisor (coordinating the agenda and wrangling reports as well as liaising with the community on public forum and deputation requests) and Mary our Principal Advisor. Other staff have helped with the running of the meetings – with the real time creation of the minutes on the screen above me or in enabling openness and transparency for our decision making via the live stream. Thank you to you all."