Vicki Buck

Vicki Buck, Founder, Climate Action Campus, former Mayor and City Councillor

Vicki set up the Climate Action Campus (climateaction.school.nz) on the site of the old Avonside Girls High School, adjacent to the red zone although it began with some red-zoned land next door. She worked to establish the campus between 2019 and 2024, and some 50 schools now participate. She was Mayor of Christchurch from 1989 to 1998, and rejoined the City Council as a Councillor between 2013 and 2019, serving as Deputy Mayor until 2016.

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How did you became involved with activities in the red zone and the Climate Action Campus? 

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Basically by setting it up: it actually came out of listening to 

students submit on the City’s climate change strategy. I was chairing the public sessions. And a lot of kids came in, some as young as 8 or 10. What came through incredibly strongly was the whole climate angst , ‘ You’ve  stolen our future, so what's the point of anything?’ Because with climate change, there's really no certainty about anything. It was very hard to disagree with anything they said. At much the same time, the School Strike for Climate was happening and a number of schools were telling their kids they couldn’t join in. It's an existential threat and impacts young people way more than older ones because it’s been ignored so long but they were being told they couldn’t be part of it which I thought was just crazy.

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So I thought what could we do that it was actually part of their lives? All the research that I’ve read talks about the importance of taking action. There's a really good book by Rebecca Huntley called How to Talk about Climate Change in a Way that Makes a Difference [Murdoch Books 2021]. It doesn't really matter what the action is because you then keep taking action. I thought how can we embed that into the school day? And I had chaired the group of half a dozen awesome people here in Christchurch who established Discovery1 and Unlimited as special character state schools in about 2000. They are now combined to create Ao Tawhiti Unlimited Discovery (aotawhiti.school.nz). So I knew you could create a special character school… so as you do in NZ, I wrote a letter to the Minister of Education. I then went to see Coralanne Child who is in charge of the Ministry of Education here, still is, and she was incredibly helpful. 

She told me about satellite schools, which I knew nothing about. I knew section 126 of the Education Act and how you set up a special character school, as I'd done that a couple of times. But I didn't know anything about satellite schools. Coralanne told me how they worked, what you could do, and then she was keen to make it a collaborative school, which is very rare among schools. And so that's what we looked at doing. So having had a 10-minute lesson on satellite schools, I said, right, we'll go and do one of those. It sounds great. What spaces have you got? And this – the old Avonside Girls campus - was one of the spaces, and by far the nicest. It is handy to town, right in the red zone, by the river, everything you could possibly want. So great, great location. And some buildings, because some of the sites didn't have any buildings on them. By this stage Avonside Girls High had already moved to their new site in Travis Road and Linwood High (now Te Aratai) was using the site while their new school was being finished.

How did you develop the campus?

The climate change strategy sessions were in 2018 and then I finished on the Council in 2019. So from then on I was working on this effectively full time but mostly voluntarily. We started with the land next door in Cowlishaw Street but we had to get that from LINZ [Land Information New Zealand] first. That's the red zone land and LINZ controlled it at that stage and that was quite a long process. So we finally got that. Linwood High School was still decanted into the old Avonside Girls site.

A satellite school has to have a sponsor school. That is in this case - unsurprisingly - Ao Tawhiti Unlimited Discovery. And the joy of them is that they understand. They're not going to say to kids, you can't go do real stuff on climate action. Stephen, who was principal at the start of the journey, was awesome and so too has Anita Yarwood been, who took over from Stephen. She’s been amazing. Then I went out and got eight schools involved, primary and secondary, plus the sponsor school. Other schools were also awesome: Hagley College, Girls High School, Rawhiti, Te Waka Unua and others - they were all great. Another huge benefit of Ao Tawhiti is that it is both primary and secondary so the satellite can be too. In fact the Campus caters for everything from preschools to tertiary and all sorts of groups across the city.

So we got those and started finally with the red zone land next door. We got to meet quite a lot of people who had lived there because they came back while we were working on it. The kids would start coming out there and our one building at that stage was a rented port-a-loo. Then we got some greenhouses, courtesy of the lovely people at Rata Foundation and the City Council. And so the kids would come out and just basically work, play, climb, run outside, and create incredible games as well. We still have all this lovely space and in there now, among lots of other groups on site, is Bush Kindy. They've moved in there and they've just started a bush school, which is outside all the time. 

Then finally Linwood Hight School moved, became Te Aratai College down the road and we were allowed to take this school space. And we had a lovely guy from the Ministry working with us on property to start with for the first couple of years, Paul Angland, who was incredibly helpful. Things like painting the buildings, which you're expected to do periodically, all these works of street art are from the City Council's graffiti team via Mel Hillier. There's something like 70 or 80 street artists, some of them are from schools. And they range from about 10 year olds to the guy who did the beautiful swan on the back of that building there, who is 82. So it kind of grew organically, which is appropriate. Groups just came in from the community and wanted to start a project, like a forest or whatever. So they did that, and then more. So the campus is not confined to schools. 

There’s other people on site. Te Aratai discovered their new buildings were too small for their Tech Centre so came back into about nine classrooms. We’ve rented out some other classrooms, because we don't have anything like enough money to run a school. So White Room Creative, Nature Lab who are in love with insects, E5 Art and Clay, Free Theatre, Envirohub, and many more are here. 

The Ministry funds some teaching time but we don't charge any of the schools for coming here. There's now something like 50 schools and groups coming and that just grows all the time. But some of them are preschool, some of them are tertiary, some of them are skills-based, some of them are different groups. And we don't charge because we don't want to, because it's not what we think of education as being. 

Our priorities are that we're almost at, if not already at, 1.5 degrees of warming. So reduction of emissions is obviously really important but also coping with the fact that the climate is changing quite dramatically and quickly and adaptation will be necessary. So our initial focus is on four areas but the kids can do whatever they like because Ao Tawhiti is based on kids learning around things that excite them. So it's not, ‘Sit here, do what we tell you and lose all your curiosity’. It's not about obedience, discipline and conformity, which the old Industrial Revolution English school system is based on, and which ours was initially. It’s about what excites you, how would you learn, what would you want to learn about? It's based on the child at the centre of the learning. 

And so the kids can literally come and do any project that they want to, but our four priorities are water, obviously, and the river is really important and the quality of water, but also the fact that nitrates are going under the Waimakariri river into Christchurch’s beautiful water system. So clean water and the importance of that. Food security, because since we've been here in the last five years, we've had about four 1 in 50 or 1 in 100-year events. So the water comes right up to the gate. Fortunately the school is raised, thankfully. Food security, energy security, because the demand for electricity is just going to go through the roof. Those solar panels all along those classrooms went in quite early. 

There's a company in Christchurch that will basically allow schools to put solar on their roof for free and give them a revenue stream. Because if they give them a discount on the electricity, the discount effectively goes to the Ministry of Education. And strangely, no schools seem excited by that. So they can give them just a revenue stream that they can use for whatever. Rangiora High School has just done it with a huge array, and they've started giving scholarships with theirs. 

And of course, transport given that’s a very large proportion of Christchurch’s emissions. We have a lovely pile of original bike from Christchurch’s original Bike share scheme, and obviously they’re solar panels all along those classrooms. The panels went in quite early. We’ve also got a Trash 2 Treasure that we've established over there with Naylor Love, the building company, and that's basically about taking clean construction waste and redistributing it to the community for free. It works really well and stops a lot of cool stuff being dumped.

The four areas were the sort of things that we looked at doing. But kids will change all that every day and do the things that excite them as well. But there are a range of things that we can offer them. The kids might want to do building or art or whatever. We had a kids' programme in the kitchen during Kidsfest, and the artist and the kids painted the kitchen, and board games on climate change from Meepleopolis. There's now an art group who are into nature-based clay works. So quite a lot of kids are into that. There's all sorts and it will keep changing. The theme is climate action, but it's going to be different for each kid. Or it might be kayaking on the river or working with others to get the Māori world view of the river. What excites one kid or gets them motivated might be radically different for other kids. So now people who are actual teachers, because I'm not, run the place. And they have programmes that they can offer or kids can come and decide what they want to do. 

How do you feel that it's working out in relation to your original aim of Climate Action?

I had a concept but one of the joys of Christchurch is how many interesting people and groups there always are, so once you’ve got the idea and the space then there will be a thousand people who come and put their input into things. So I think it's great, it's awesome. This location and the green space is amazing. The capacity to do quite different things than what they normally do is, I think, awesome. Last year they did NCEA units on climate change and we're looking at how we do those on clean energy and things. We’ve worked with Orion [the local electricity lines company] on that. What you find in Christchurch is that there are a whole pile of other people doing amazing things and having such big space meant that we could offer some of them some space as well and they could work alongside us. So it's kind of just starting it and see where it goes. It's becoming quite a big environmental hub, quite a village actually. 

Now we’ve got both the site and to a small extent a revenue stream. That requires constant innovation. Schools operate on the smell of an oily rag (not a good analogy now!). Basically everything like the solar panels, getting somebody to teach for the community groups, the greenhouses, those things have been funded by the lovely people at the Rata Foundation, the City Council Sustainability Fund and a few other organisations who have been amazing. But it does require a lot of applications. All of the applications came down to me for the first five years. So it was pretty full on! I finished in June last year, so five years it was full time with a token payment. Now we have two full-time teachers here spread amongst three people and another person that we've funded as well. From the rents we were able to get a property person for two and a half, now three days a week which has been great but we keep adding more stuff like Trash 2 Treasure. Renting some of the classrooms was key because most of the stuff we're doing with students is going to be outside. There's somebody who does Māori weaving and she'll help teach the kids. A person who does clay will help teach the kids. The person over in the garages doing woodwork will help teach the kids as well. So, yeah, it's kind of creating a village as well.

I think you have to be reasonably dogged in this sort of project. LINZ took a while, but they got there in the end. The Council’s red zone rangers are just lovely. I don't think people have been a problem at all. And Coralanne Child from the Ministry has been stunning. I did not know about satellite schools, so I would not know that you could, because who would? It's like when we were setting up Discovery and Unlimited, I didn't know that section 126 of the Education Act was there. So I sat down and read that. And some guy at some meeting told me about it. I still don't know the person's name. He was just a very quiet member of the Ministry of Education. But he deserves a very big thank you, and I don't even know who he is. 

What do you see then as the future of the Climate Action Campus and the future of the red zone? 

I think in terms of the Climate Action Campus we'll just get bigger with more kids involved. Some certainty of ongoing finance would be really good. I think it will just keep going and keep adding more and more stuff. There's Hagley College, for example, which was one of the other founder schools: they have a huge emphasis on refugee and migrants. They come here and while they're learning English and how things work here, they're building and recycling stuff and making stuff. It's just lovely. More things will just happen. Because I think once you're established and you've got some space, things just happen. 

But in terms of climate change, I think we're at or very close to 1.5 degrees of warming, and I'm not optimistic about that. My natural disposition is to be optimistic about everything, but I have to say I can't watch programmes on the Antarctic ice sheet. I can totally understand why kids are terrified. But what I've discovered from both Discovery and Unlimited (now Ao Tawhiti Unlimited Discovery) and this place, is that what's inside kids' heads is phenomenal. That would make me feel optimistic, but I don't think it's fair at all to put the whole climate emergency onto kids. We've all caused it, we all need to do something about it. I think the red zone is an amazing opportunity in that respect. I know it came from huge personal disasters for people in the earthquake(s). But it’s been lovely to show people who used to live in the red zone component of the Campus what is happening here now.

We’ve got an experimental area that is going to be very similar to climate change situations, except that the house owners at least got paid out. Probably not anything like what they wanted, but because it was earthquake related, it's kind of like sea level rise and enables us to experiment. And the City to Sea pathway will be amazing. I think the red zone has got untold possibilities and it's so big. And you know, the fact that you can rent it at the moment for a dollar, it's phenomenal. 

Interview with Eric Pawson, at the Climate Action Campus on Avonside Drive, 17 March 2025.

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