Christchurch City Council  is looking for people who might like to be involved with one or both of the following community projects:

• Riccarton Emergency Preparedness Plan
• Showcasing Riccarton

Emergency Preparedness Plan

Around the city and the country, communities get together to prepare an emergency preparedness plan that sets out the resources that can ‘kick in’ should an emergency happen.  These are developed for communities by communities and involve a stocktake of what resources are already in a community and how they could be utilised in an emergency.

These are generally developed alongside Council, Civil Defence and Neighbourhood Support.  As a Council we can facilitate the process, but definitely require community input at various stages as much as possible.  A working party would get together to plan how and when this could happen.  This is not a process that happens overnight, but could be launched or developed at a Riccarton Showcase event.

This will need to be a Riccarton wide plan – not just a localised neighbourhood plan.  Some examples that have been developed in Christchurch are;

• Belfast Emergency Response Plan
• Aranui, Avondale, Bexley, Wainoni Emergency Response Plan
• Sumner Disaster Response Plan
• Cashmere Community Response Plan

Showcasing Riccarton – an event or week/programme of events that showcase Riccarton

• This will involve the opportunity for organisations (community and other) to showcase what they do, offer to people who live, work, study and play in Riccarton.  This could involve an expo type event, a series of events or both.
• This idea has come about following a Housing New Zealand expo for residents where non-Housing New Zealand residents of the Riccarton area asked for a similar expo type event where they could find out about the activities, programmes etc on offer in Riccarton.
• Westfield Mall has a community space for community organisations to raise their profile.
• This could also be an opportunity for organisations to organise an event or similar in their own backyard.  It could be as simple as an open-house to a community clean up to a suburb wide garage/boot sale.  Our team is here to help develop and promote ideas and events. (eg how can we make this happen?)
• It would be good to have this take place around Neighbourhood Week (last week of October/beginning of November)

If you want to know more – or are interested please contact marie.byrne@ccc.govt.nz, Community Development Advisor CCC by 15 September.