Southland Community Vision Report = Completed. What next? » Shaping Our Future Queenstown Lakes

Data Gathering

July 2022, we embarked on a tour of Southland District.

The purpose? To produce a district-wide long-term vision for Southland bringing together the distinct but separated communities, with a particular focus on engaging with rural Southland, mana whenua and the districts’ youth.

We ran 8 in-person workshops in Athol, Lumsden, Wyndham, Winton, Stewart Island, Riverton and Te Anau. We got participants to offload the pressing issues of today and turn it into collective goals and create a roadmap for a successful Southland future.

Snap taken from the Shaping our Future Southland Tour, Lumsden workshop.

In conjunction with the workshops, we circulated an online survey for those who couldn’t make the dates.

We took to the survey to streets and conducted face to face engagement Lumsden, Gore, Winton & Invercargill to captured further community sentiment.

We hosted highschool workshops for the students at Aparima and Fiordland Colleges.
We took this survey to significant iwi events like the ‘Te Tapu O Tane’ Nursery opening.

By December we had enough data to produce a Community Vision Report.
By April is draft was presented back to the communities earlier this year with MP Joseph Mooney opening the Winton session and presented to council staff at the Southland District Council.

call-me-southland-john-glover-and-joseph-mooney

Executive Officer, John Glover with MP Joseph Mooney with the Southland Visioning Report.

So, what next?

This report makes recommendations based off the feedback we retrieved. We found…

The aspirational vision was generally supported – broad enough so people could apply their own lens.
Strong support for localism, decentralisation, use of tried and tested models, reducing bureaucracy and regulation.
Suggestion that careers be developed for youth that lead to the provision of health care in communities.
Include natural healing/alternative health with medical/heartland services.
EV charging network should be paid for by the suppliers.
Use library space for co-working hubs.
Should the cost of seismic strengthening be left to property owners of empty high street premises?
Concern around impacting existing property rights re second homes/ short term visitor accommodation.

The next step is to inform the decision makers.

The timing of our Southland tour attracted campaigning politicians in the local body election to workshops who wanted to gather insight into the temperament of people and the issues they held in serious regard.

Having gone through the exercise they were intrigued to read the findings in the completed report.
We sent this report to Southland District Council, to the new Mayor Scott (who attended x3 workshops) and to Enviro Southland.

This email was a FYI prompt to say, ‘Hey, this is what the people think about now and this is what they want long term’.

This report is on our website and is freely available to anyone.

https://shapingourfuture.org.nz/call-me-southland-workshops/

It sits there patiently, ready to be activated as a source for any long-term planning.