Porirua City has been deservedly hitting the headlines lately for its achievements.  Winning the 2009 IPANZ Prime Minister's Award for Public Sector Excellence for creating a safer city is one example.  Their Village Planning Programme is another.

This article gives a Cannons Creek taste of the new Village Planning approach in Porirua where the Council and communities are working with the strengths of Porirua's geography and people.  The Village Planning Programme is a partnership between Porirua City Council and the city's diverse villages. "It aims to harness each community's vision for its village and then, by working together, turn those dreams into plans and actions to ensure our villages are the best they can be."  said Moira Lawler the Council's Manager of Social and Economic Planning.

July 2009

An internal culture change at Taupo District Council has generated the environment for a neighbourhood based approach to working more effectively alongside community aspirations and leadership. The change process is strongly supported politically and managerially.  It has attracted staff's active engagement and moved the organisation away from a rules based approach and towards values and aspirational targets, within a culture of trust. Rather than a focus on "did I follow the rules?", the new culture focuses more on "being the best we can". The key measurements within that culture has become:

• What have I done? Did I help? Did I get the work done?
• If not, why not? And what action can I take on those issues?

Working together to find the common vision and a common goal for a community can provide opportunities for:

There are a whole variety of ways in which this can be done.

This material has been arranged under Topics & Themes selected from the menu on left.

Mataura residents explored their dreams on a November Saturday last year (2008) at a powerful one-day community workshop. Led by international community development facilitator, Rev. Bliss Browne, the meeting drew wide participation and demonstrated a unity of vision and depth of local resources that surprised and encouraged many.

Seventy residents and agency staff explored their vision of what was important, what areas needed to be worked on, how to find allies and begin acting on those needs. Mrs Browne described her background as banker, priest, mother, and civic activist and referred to her experience with Imagine Chicago, a project that had turned around a city of 7.5m people where many young people had opted out.