times was quite ill, so I stepped into his shoes to keep the ball rolling, He passed away four years ago, and he asked me to continue the work in a professional capacity. That’s how I became the network manager at AvON.

 

How did the Richmond Community Garden came into being?

 

First we re-established the Avebury House garden, and then were looking for something bigger to do. While waiting for Downers to move their pipes [for repairing Dudley Creek], we started work by the adjacent patch of native trees using […..] culture methodology, mounds of carbon to create soil, in which we grew vegetables temporarily. Then we planted more native trees, which are now huge. We were always thinking ahead: we took on a half an acre in the first instance from Land Information New Zealand (LINZ). It took a lot of figuring out how to do it, as we were one of the first leases. Then, before we knew it, we had three acres. We do annual vegetable growing; we have a food forest and nature play for families. We've got three really big events that we run with other groups every year. About three years ago, there was one red zone house nearby that hadn't been demolished. When we found out that they had finally taken the buyout offer, we went to LINZ to advocate for it to be retained so that we could turn it into a hub for our activities. It took two years of negotiations, because the land was still with the government. We were the second title to be transferred, after the Bill Sutton house. That's enabled us to create a really cool hub, much needed and much loved. It’s very busy.

 

It’s for our Richmond Community Garden Trust to work from but we've got about 10 other organisations here. It’s a mixture of Richmond-based and environmental organisations, like We Are Richmond, the White Room, Recreate, Hohepa Homes. Every year we have the Richmond Spring Fair. And then our gala in March, and Matariki in the Zone, which was an originally an AvON event out at Anzac Drive. We bought it to Richmond about four or five years ago, and it's been really successful here. We run all sorts of different smaller events - market days, learning days, educational workshops on sustainability, learning how to garden, learning about plastic recycling, about composting. So it's pretty busy around here. It’s driven by the Riverlution Collective, which is made up of people who are really interested in activating the Richmond part of the red zone. So that’s the Richmond Community Garden, supported by We Are Richmond, Avebury House, AvON.

 

Riverlution is really a brand as we didn't want to set up another formal organisation which is why we call it a collective. But in terms of holding funding and governance, the Richmond Community Garden Trust drives and does that. We have the Riverlution tiny village, who are looking to put tiny houses in Swanns Road, the Riverlution Cafe, the Riverlution Precious Plastics programme. So there's lots of different things popping up under that branding. It's a way to describe the Richmond part of the red zone. The Riverlution trail is the next thing to do, alongside the City to Sea pathway. It will encompass art works and nature stops, using art in nature play. Our goal is to have a place where people can come for a day and engage in a whole bunch of activities, and in recreation.

 

The network is about 30 organisations and individuals that have got interests in the area. Our Richmond Community Garden Trust Operations Manager is pretty busy. The trust has three social enterprises that we're hoping will help drive funding into the Riverlution trail, because it's really hard to find funding for that stuff. That’s the Revolution Cafe, the Olive Oil Co-op, which we do citywide every year. Precious Plastics also collects plastics citywide, which we turn into products. We've got a little shop as well. Our Matariki event requires funding, but our other two events are fundraiers. We have a lot of volunteers, it's passionate people coordinating each other. I think when you've built capacity, which we have done here, that just comes naturally, but we do have our paid Operations Manager. And we have our Garden Coordinator, who's part time, who runs our volunteer sessions on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. There’s between eight and 15 people at a session; we probably have a pool of about 50 or 60, not including all the groups that come weekly. Groups like Hohepa Homes, for example, have their own spaces inside the garden, but they also help out in Dudley Stream. They've got a planting site up there that we help facilitate. So Riverlution is pretty extensive. It’s like a mushroom.

 

What’s your role with the Avon Ōtākaro Network?

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I’m the Network Manager. My role has been in the strategic advocacy space for a long time, and doing projects that show what the river corridor could be. We've achieved pretty much everything we set out to do. Our vision was to have a City to Sea pathway with maximum indigenous restoration across the red zone land, and also to put in better stop banking systems for the river to be able to move, and engineered stormwater retention basins across the whole corridor in order to help clean the river, because it's not in a great state. And then community-led development making sure that the stakeholders, the people who gave up their properties and the people left behind, are looked after. So our role is to make sure that when there's big decisions and things happening that those people have an opportunity to be heard, which we have done in various forums. We also worked at a pretty high level around the table with LINZ and government at the time, prior to the land title being moved to the Council. Now we work with the Council and also promote co-governance of the corridor.  We have representation through me on that to make sure that the structures put in place secure the land in perpetuity. That's our vision, that the vision we've held is put in place in a legal way, for life. Then I can retire.

 

No, just kidding. I would never retire from AvON because now that I've had a chance to shift our lens from the river corridor to the river, I can see how much our river is hurting from urbanisation. We are looking at catchment wide now, at building on the network that we already have in the red zone, and introducing upstream catchment groups. Finding out where the gaps are, providing governance and funding to little projects to get off the ground. We've now got quite a few people wanting to do things, but who don't want to set up an incorporated society or a trust. We can help them get off the ground, and act as a conduit or facilitator between groups. And there's also a lot of individuals who don't know what to do with their stream. So it's the same role, but extending to the whole catchment. But whatever happens going forward in the red zone, we’ll still have a role in being the voice of the stakeholders there. There’s well over 35 big stakeholders throughout the whole catchment.

 

I've been struggling in the last two years to do what we've been doing in the past in the red zone, because things are currently swimming along smoothly. Sometimes I wonder if I need to be here, because there's a good team in the Council in the most part. But what happens when they've got a bad team or they replace someone who doesn't understand it deeply, or doesn't understand stakeholders? That's the challenge. We put a lot of energy into writing our last strategic plan, even though Evan was really ill at the time, and making that commitment to see the next five years through. We're coming to the end of that next year. It’s important to bring in critical friends too, instead of doing it siloed. We’re starting the planning process on Wednesday, in preparation to replace the 2020 -2025 plan, because we've got to do our Constitution as well. The first stage for us is doing some SWAT analysis, and succession planning for me as well. I initially agreed to do this for a year, we're now four years into it. I think it's time to hand the mantle over to someone who has got more energy and skills around water quality and what's required to improve it.

 

We've been really lucky with funding as we've had a close relationship with the Tindall Foundation for nine years. Every three years we have a theme: the last three have been about revitalization; the first three were recovery. We've worked with them around these themes, and that's closely aligned to our strategic plan. It's not the funder driving us, so much as us working with the funder to complement each other in terms of delivery. It’s hard to get funding for that work, because it's meta work, it's strategic advocacy. So we've been really grateful to have that relationship, which is now coming to the end. It's timely to think about this now, as what we are going to do next is easier to get funded. So biodiversity, what we're doing around cleaning the river and working with school groups and planting: that kind of stuff is a bit more simpler to get funded. And AvON has a great track record of delivery, and good foundations to be supported by the City Council and ECan [Environment Canterbury, the regional council]. We deliver on the funding: for every dollar they give us we turn it into $61. For every dollar they give us, we go out and get funding from somebody else, and we calculate all our volunteer hours and stuff that we facilitate. So it's good value for money. But it's really important that our committee is strong and understands the work that's needed to do around submissions and being on top of all of the internal stuff that's going on in the Council, government, and ECan.

 

What does the co-governance work involve?

 

The co-governance establishment group was set up with five representatives from manawhenua, with one being from the Ihutai runanga. And then five from community and Council-elected members. The former mayor, Lianne Dalziel, and Te Maire Tau are the co-chairs. And then there’s Kelly Barber, who's elected, plus three skills-based representatives. One is community, which is the role I have, because we understand the community stakeholders. There's an ecologist and a recreational person. The establishment group has nearly finished our job. We spent a lot of time establishing the decision-making framework for consideration of projects, how they’re considered and the steps to be taken. That was kind of like a merger of the objectives of the Regeneration Plan and Ngāi Tūāhuriri’s vision for return to a delta environment. The decision-making process and that document is awesome. It's solid and takes everything into consideration. It would be hard for something not part of the vision to get over the line.

 

The framework needs to be part of a trust document, or some sort of legal structure, to protect it for future generations. At this stage, it's looking like a smaller group will form a trust. It wouldn't be a sensible thing for a trust to take over the land, because there's a lot of liability there at the moment, because the engineering hasn't been done around the stop banks and stormwater. The sensible thing to do is form a committee of Council that can help with decision-making to get projects moving, and then transfer the land once the project is complete, into the trust, and then eventually, over time, the trust will hold the future decision making over what's left. The structure would be similar to the Rod Donald Banks Peninsula Trust. Hopefully the recommendation will be made soon. I think the current group would stay, but reduced. It needs to be one elected member, and one community appointment with the right skills, and I think I have the right skills at present. In five or ten year’s time, it might be a different skill set, but currently I think someone who understands the regeneration process and the stakeholders, needs to be the appointment, whether that's me or somebody else.

 

Let’s move on to your role in the Food Resilience Network (FRN).

 

This is another post-earthquake initiative. After the disaster it was quite apparent that we had a food security issue in terms of supply chains and whatnot. A hui was had in 2015 and a lot of people said we need to have a way of advocating for food security in the city. That's when the Edible Canterbury Charter was signed, by about 100 groups. We're now up to about 120 organisations throughout Canterbury that have signed it, plus individuals. The charter has a set of objectives and we've set about doing that in the last few years. Around about the same time in 2015 our government decided they’d better have a community green spaces in the central city blueprint. They selected 227 Cambridge Terrace. The FRN tendered for it and won and that's how the Ōtākaro Orchard came about. Sometime we decided we probably need a hub, so stupidly, we went about building a building.

 

We broke ground on the building in 2019 and we’re still not finished. We've got $300k to go. We'll get there. We'll be open soon. The building is an architecturally designed exemplar of sustainability and stormwater retention, with a living roof and solar array, the only one in the country. The flooring is heated by water from the array. The only thing that leaves the site is black waste from the two inside toilets. The other toilets are compostable. All of the grey water gets reused. None of the storm water goes off site – it’s captured in a swale or in a tank. It's got internal adobe bricks, which are heat and cooling collectors. It's all about permaculture design and climate change adaptation. And despite the building process, which is taking a lot of energy from our team, we've also restored the urban farm across the road, which was Cultivate Christchurch’s old site on Manchester St. They shut down after COVID. Now we're farming it but Cultivate are doing their work with MSD to get youths involved in horticulture to get them motivated and skilled to find jobs.

 

The farm and our work are going really well. We deliver to school huis which are teaching educators how to do permaculture. And just about every action in the Council's climate action strategy for food is an FRN objective, so we're delivering on their strategy. We have regular network meetings, drawn from the charter groups. Then we have a Food Security Council, which is drawn from University of Canterbury, Lincoln, Council, Te Whatu Ora, Community Public Health, Horticultural Society. We’ve got an MOU with the University around delivering the high level academic side of it. We would like to have more hands on interaction with PhD and Master students around food security.

 

The role of the Cambridge Terrace site is as a hub, a place for people to meet around food security. We have a cafe, a greengrocer, which will be focused on local producers, an information centre, and a shared office. We're hoping, based on our numbers, that our social enterprise will enable us to run our organisation and also give back to the food systems in Christchurch and Canterbury. We hope to fund projects for individuals and groups that want to do stuff. If a local group wants to plant trees and fruit trees in their park, we'll help facilitate that and educate them on how to do it properly. I've been working with Council, and we’re putting a process in place. The urban parks team will put the trees in and manage them for three years, and then in that time, we'll educate the group or individual on how to prune them, how to look after them, how to build a food forest. The food forest at the Ōtākaro Orchard and the building are for those purposes.

 

What have you learned that could be of value to people elsewhere who are or will face similar challenges?

 

Do the community development now, before you have the disaster! I don't know if you've heard the story about Civil Defence and Covid? They set up their 0800 number in Wellington for the country, and they weren't getting any calls from Canterbury or Christchurch specifically. In the debrief, the reflection was that we had established really good networks post-earthquake, and those just kicked into gear. I can see how that happened, because we did it ourselves. As soon as we knew there was a lockdown, we were all on a zoom going, okay, how can we support people? And then we set about putting things in place so that we could communicate what's happening, support people and point them to the right direction. Our community had taken care of those questions before they needed to ring Civil Defence.

 

I feel like this had come into being since the earthquakes. I've lived here for 30 years. I didn't know anyone for the first 15.  Now I walk around the neighbourhood and know people. I would say that's the same for a lot of people. It starts by identifying the needs of your community and then figuring out how to fulfill the need, and then drawing everyone in. I could walk away from here now and it would still continue, which is success, because it's not reliant on one person. But I think my biggest learning was after the floods in Auckland. The Auckland City Council put a new team of community development people in: they came down here to visit. They came talk to me about how we did it here. My personal opinion from what I see going on here in the city is that when a community rises up and the Council identifies that and comes down to match it, that's when the magic happens. If a community rises up and the people with the power to help don't, then it most likely won’t go very far. I said to the Auckland team, identify the people. Don't do it top down, rather work with… it’s a twofold process.

 

This was really hard work here. Take this project we're in now, the Richmond Community Garden hub. Getting this house was hard as no one had done it before, and LINZ wasn't set up for that. When we did the title handover event, I was standing beside one of the people at LINZ, and she was crying. And I was crying too because it was a long, tough kind of road. I said to her, ‘Why are you crying?’ And she's like, ‘Why are you crying?’ And when we got talking, she didn't go and work for LINZ to do this. And I didn't particularly buy a house here to do that. But then we talked about how we actually did work well together, even though she was coming at it from a different lens. We used to butt heads quite a lot, because I was coming at it from a community point of view and wanting to get stuff done, and she was coming in from a land management point of view, and needing to manage health and safety and land contamination. But actually we were coming at it from the same place, if you looked at it deeply. So understanding the lenses people come at things from then you can start making things happen. But that wasn't easy in the beginning, because I had no clue.

 

I see the red zone and the removal of the people from the land as an opportunity for our city to do something that no other city will really get a chance to do. Where in the world would you get 5000 houses removed so that you could then put in a really great system to cleanse our water and make our river healthy, at the same time as protecting the remaining properties?. Now with urban intensification, there’s going to be more challenges with water quality. And we've also got an opportunity to innovate around adaptation as well. I feel like everyone's talking about adaptation and managed retreat. But why do we need to manage retreat? Why can't we live with and work with adaptation? That's what adaptation is, right? Let's be innovative and visionary. I hope that whatever governance structure emerges for the red zone will be visionary and let things be trialled so that we can be a bit of an exemplar to the rest of the world about how we can work with adaptation. That's my hope for the future.

 

Interview with Eric Pawson at Richmond Community Garden, 9 September 2024