Greener Neighbourhoods is a competition that has been running through the Kāpiti Coast District Council for the past seven years. What is interesting about the programme is not only has it galvanised a large number of local neighbourhoods to reduce their environmental footprints, but it has also spiralled outwards into a wide range of unrelated ecological initiatives that have stood the test of time and appear to have gained a high level of community engagement.
The effectiveness of this programme leaves me wondering whether there is potential for other regional councils to follow the KCDC’s example and implement a similar competition model in their regions.
This week we talk to Vanessa Crowe from KCDC about her involvement in the programme.
BT: I might ask you a fairly basic question that I ask of virtually everyone I meet, which is: in your own words, what do you do?
VC: I am the Sustainable Communities Coordinator, and so my role is about building communities, increasing resilience and reducing environmental impact. The main thing I do is run the Greener Neighbourhoods programme, which is about getting community groups together to look at how they can make reductions to their eco footprint over a year.
We try to get people to shift their thinking around their waste and consumption by providing support, expertise and some funding help.
BT: So how long has the Greener Neighbourhoods competition been up and running?
VC: This is going to be the seventh year. It started in 2010 and it’s my second year of running the programme. We have four neighbourhoods across the district, which is usually the right number for me to support. Each group has five or more neighbours in their neighbourhood.
BT: So it’s like a competition between groups to reduce your gross environmental footprint?
VC: Yep, and then the other aspect is about community building. We’ve got four groups at the moment, they will have their awards event in May where the Greenest Neighbourhood will be announced. The competition is judged looking at the reduction of their eco footprint and also what they’ve done for the group in terms of community projects. There’s a $2000 prize and the groups will pitch a project that they would like to do together if they win the competition. This is following a community match fund model, where funding is given to match their efforts of a group who wish to get a project started in their community.
BT: Is the expectation that that $2,000 will be spent on ecological initiatives or environmentally friendly technology?
VC: The groups can all pitch their own project that they want to do, and then the judges will assess that. This is the first time we’ve put that angle into the project, previously money was awarded and people could choose to donate it to a worthy cause.
We encourage all ecological and environmental friendly initiatives. For example one of the ideas that a group has had is looking into the feasibility of getting more solar panels and green clean energy in their neighbourhood. I’m not sure how far $2,000 will stretch with their project, but they’ve got the enthusiasm to start looking into it.
Another group has a community beehive that they’ve been raising money to work towards, and another is looking at establishing in an orchard on a piece of Council land in their neighbourhood. There’s quite a big negotiation there in terms of who would look after the fruit trees, but that’s quite a sizeable project and $2,000 would help to get them off the ground.
BT: So it’s actually like start-up capital for environmental or sustainable entrepreneurship?
VC: I guess it’s similar to (capital for) entrepreneurship, but it’s more a community model based on building on the assets groups have in their community. It begins by groups identifying what these are, and then sharing ideas about what they would like to do together, without us limiting it too much.
BT: So it doesn’t have to be a business model, it could be something else?
VC: Yep, mostly it’s for projects in and for the community. Other Greener Neighbourhood groups in the past have flowed into a group called POG which is the Paekākāriki Organic Gardens group. They formed a group that negotiated with council to plant fruit trees, so they planted like 100 fruit trees.
Another initiative called the Paekākāriki Rat Pack began as a Greener Neighbourhoods workshop and snowballed into being a part of the Kāpiti Mainland Island biodiversity project whose idea is to make from the Raumati South end of Queen Elizabeth Park in right down to Pukerua Bay, pest free.
So what started a little workshop for a group to build their own rat traps has resulted in hundreds of traps being made with the money that people pay for their traps then going into a fund for materials to make the next round of traps.
BT: They’ve got a nice sustainable model there.
VC: There are some great initiatives that come out of these groups, but really you do need a whole year of people simply getting to know each other and having pot luck dinners and garden bees and workshops for people to get to know each other and think about their own local environment.
BT: That’s cool, I like that. How long is the timeframe for Greener Neighbourhoods, is there a start and finish?
VC: It usually starts in June and gets judged in the following April-May, so almost a full year. But it’s sort of in July that it gets started properly. So you would expect that it’s up to 10 months of proper involvement and a year of getting things going and wrapping things up at the end, though really it’s not an end. After a year groups are established to go on and do things for themselves
BT: How do you judge a winner?
VC: At the moment, it’s 40% on your eco footprint reduction and the other 60% divided up between community action and projects that you might wish to do, and also the pitch of the project plan that you might wish to do with the money that you receive.
BT: So there’s only four groups? Is that the maximum that’s allowed to compete?
VC: Historically there’s only ever been four groups, and so in my tenure, I was open to having more groups, but we didn’t quite get enough people signing up to it in time. It’s quite a big commitment to get your neighbourhood together and get them into it. So we’ve stuck with four and what it’s meant is that I’ve had enough time to develop other community initiatives as well. I think that’s been quite good. I probably won’t push for more than four, but if more than four want to sign up, I’ll take them on.
BT: What constitutes a group?
VC: The minimum requirement is that there are more than five households in the group. And that you are within a neighbourhood, so it began as being on the same street, but now it’s within walking distance.
BT: Do bigger groups have more of an advantage? If you’ve got more people, say 200 people compared to 10, then presumably you can have a much bigger impact on your environmental footprint?
VC: You can, but the footprint is measured as an average across the group. In Raumati, we’ve got a group with about 25 households. I tend to try and let the groups arrange themselves as they wish, with groups of that size they typically need more structure or more management for it to work, finding dates that suit everyone can be tricky with larger groups. Though they also have more people to get things done – it is scalable up to a bigger size, but there are pros and cons to it.
BT: How much involvement do you have with the individual groups over a year?
VC: I’m in contact with most of them about once per week, some every few weeks. I tend to follow their lead in terms of how much involvement they would like. I’ve got one leader of a group with whom I am probably in text contact once per week if not more, and other groups that I’m in their Facebook page just answering questions or by email.
At the beginning, I attend their meetings and lead an information about the whole programme, and about our eco footprinting calculator. One exercise is for the groups to make a sign for their street, which is a chance for them to get creative and represent who they are. Another thing I’d like to add in here is the concept of “Asset Mapping”, where you get the group together and allow people to discover for themselves who they are and what they can add. I spend some time doing that with a group so I can help them get together and identify their common interests.
BT: What do you mean by Asset Mapping?
VC: It’s a model for community development. It’s about helping a group to realise all of the valuable things they have in their neighbourhood. People tend to focus on the negative too much – we’re a wee bit conditioned to notice the things we don’t have. It’s important to get people to feel good about what they already have and to enjoy having fun together. By giving people the opportunity to talk about all of the things that they have got in their community in a positive way for them to build on that. For example one of our current groups Pounamu Ōtaki, is a Māori whānau group, their kaupapa involves whanaungatanga, getting together to speak te reo, share their mahi and kai and doing anything green.
BT: So it’s about getting people to figure out who’s got which particular specialisation?
VC: It’s about people’s specialisation, or what’s particular to their group in terms of work, skills and place. Some neighbourhoods might have a lot of young families on tight budgets, others might be a mix of all ages, another mostly professional working couples with more money but less time. So when groups share knowledge around what they have they can figure out what they want to do to reduce their environmental impacts from a positive place.
BT: Just out of curiosity, as you liaise with the groups over the year, are you also judging them?
VC: I’m not the judge. We have judges who are completely outside of (the Kāpiti Coast District) Council. So we have five judges, Flo McNeill who is a previous Greener Neighbourhoods participant, and then another woman Anna Butterfield who runs the Love Plant Life Seeds company, Robert Glensor, the owner of Pure Bread, and Brenda Vale an academic from Victoria University who specialises in ecological footprinting and providing research expertise, as well as the deputy mayor, Janet Holborow.
BT: The timeframe is almost a year. When do people get to enter the competition?
VC: April is when we start to push for new groups. Throughout the year I meet people who are interested.
BT: How do people go about entering?
VC: I produce On To It: Sustainable Communities News, which is a part of the council website, and there’s a link to Greener Neighbourhoods where we will post registration form or people can email me.
BT: If you had a whole bunch of groups registering, would that overwhelm the competition?
VC: Four seems like a great number. An absolute maximum would be eight. If we had 20 enter then we’d have to have some sort of selection process.
BT: Can teams re-compete in the competition each year?
VC: We don’t let groups “re-compete”, it’s a once off thing. Once you’ve been through the year of support, you’re good to go. I can still provide support to those groups and have that network (even after the competition finishes), but we try and get new groups coming along.
Eventually I like to think of a map of Kāpiti and in 10 years we will have the whole thing covered with people who have participated.
BT: Is this competition unique to KCDC? Do other councils (such as Wellington City Council for instance) have equivalent competitions?
VC: This competition is unique to the Kāpiti Council.
BT: It all sounds very interesting.
VC: Well, let me know if you have any interest in this.
BT: I’ll have to have a word with the local Poker Club!
