Christchurch Earthquake bulletin edition 160
new-zealand-labour-party
Tue Dec 13 2011 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)
Christchurch Earthquake bulletin edition 160
Tuesday, 13 December 2011, 10:20 am
Press Release: New Zealand Labour Party
Christchurch
LABOUR MPs
13 December 2011 MEDIA STATEMENT
Christchurch Earthquake bulletin edition 160
A regular bulletin started by the Labour Party’s Christchurch MPs, Clayton Cosgrove , Ruth Dyson (Port Hills) Lianne Dalziel (Christchurch East) to keep people in their electorates and media informed about what is happening at grass roots level.
Yesterday, Ruth Dyson and Lianne Dalziel spent four hours with the most enthusiastic and energising group of young people who had been brought together to develop projects under the theme ‘looking beyond disaster’. The NZ National Commission for UNESCO must be congratulated for sponsoring the Youth Forum 2011 along with JCI, Rotary International, the University of Canterbury, College House & the UCSA Volunteer Student Army.
Throw together 100 young people from 19 different countries that have all experienced natural disasters and you have the recipe for the kind of thinking outside the square that is needed as a country recovers. The projects focused on communication, accessibility, sustainability and building resilience; and covered a range of plans that encompassed a diverse range of approaches, including art therapy; community gardens; disaster awareness days; spontaneous volunteering; connecting school children; platforms for children’s stories.
The Declaration was a comprehensive statement on disaster response and recovery and would be a fitting basis for our own Recovery Strategy being prepared by CERA.
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These young people were awe-inspiring. And that is because they get it. Recovery is a process, which must be engaging and inclusive. Young people’s voices have been absent from a recovery that is about them, because the city we build will be theirs.
We need to study what has happened in Christchurch and be honest about what didn’t work as well as acknowledging what went well That way we can learn from the mistakes so we don’t repeat them, and turn the positives into templates others can pick up and run with. For every person who said ‘no’ to Sam Johnson as he attempted to volunteer an army of students, we must commit to training people in authority to say ‘yes and how can we help?’
The best proverb of the day was ‘if you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together’ and the stand-out quote was ‘with technology today we could mobilise young people ready to act, before the council had decided which room they would use to discuss it.’
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