Keep Dunedin Beautiful Awards

Dunedin (Monday, 3 March 2014) - Keep Dunedin Beautiful held its annual beautification awards ceremony at the Dunedin City Library at 4pm today.

The awards are an opportunity to recognise groups and individuals who have contributed to keeping the city beautiful. The awards were presented by Mayor of Dunedin Dave Cull and Keep Dunedin Beautiful Chair Jan Tucker.

The top four winners receive a nominal monetary prize of between $50 and $100. The two top awards are the Taylor Community Pride Award, given to a group, and the Pod award, for individuals or groups.

The award winners are:
Merit – for Dunedin clean-ups

Elmgrove School
Port Chalmers Kindergarten
Richard Hudson Kindergarten
Wakari Brownie Unit
Portobello School
Liberton Christian School
St Francis Xavier School
Pine Hill School
Balmacewan Intermediate School
Nerise Barnes
Mornington School
Arthur Street School
Mosgiel Abilities Resource Centre
St Bernadette's School
Warrington Playcentre
Geo Cache
Waikouaiti Playcentre
Tahuna Normal School
Halfway Bush Kindergarten
Mosgiel Pippins
Flipper's Daycare
Macandrew Bay School
Roslyn Keas
This Way Ltd
Maori Hill School
Parkinson's Otago
Bayfield High School
Kaikorai Valley College
Pacific Trust
Society of University of Otago Law Students

Commended
Gary Dixon cleaning graffiti off Bank Street
St Joseph's School regularly cleaning up Dunedin
Arthur Young regularly cleaning Fairfield bus shelter
Broad Bay School planting trees at Pilot's Beach
Rotary Club of Taieri cleaning war memorials
Rotaract cleaning war memorials
East Taieri School regularly cleaning up Dunedin
World Mission Society Church of God large scale clean up
Annabel and Malcolm Lowe regularly cleaning up Dunedin
Sherwood Centre Charitable Trust regularly cleaning up Dunedin
Puketai Residence regularly cleaning up Dunedin

Adopt-a-spot
Rebecca Croxen adopting Wallace St and Robert's Park
Barbara Smith adopting Highcliff Rd and the monument
Meg Davidson adopting neighbourhood area
Liz Angelo adopting Arthur St Reserve and neighbouring area
Maryanne Ashford adopting St Leonard's area
Judy Turncliff adopting neighbourhood area
Community Care Trust adopting Jacob's Ladder
James Hanan adopting harbour front

Appreciation for supporting the KDB Committee
DCC Events/Community Development - support with KDB projects
Task Force Green/Activity in the Community – support with KDB projects
Rotary Dunedin - continued support with Trees for Babies
To Be Advised Trust - continued support with the Theatre Group

Highly Commended
Robert George continued civic pride
Richard and Linda Pickering continued civic pride
Contact Energy several large scale clean-ups
Volunteering Otago continued civic pride
Noel Jhinku continued civic pride
Fraser Brown initiating a plastic bag take back project
Purakaunui Amenities Society beautifying the area with accessible tracks
Silverstream School making articles out of reusable materials
Dive Otago continued civic pride

Third place
AKO Childcare Centre instilling sustainability into every day

Second place
Marcus and Maree Johnstone beautifying Sligo Tce over many years
Beverley and Tony Perry beautifying Sligo Tce over many years

Taylor Community Pride Award
Portobello Community Inc a multitude of beautification projects

Pod
Brockville Community Development Project instilling civic pride in the community

Award Details:

Robert George – highly commended

Robert has been an adopt-a-spot volunteer at Macandrew Bay for many years. He regularly cleans up his township, but does much more than that too. As he cleans he talks to people and makes them aware of how litter affects the community. He advocates for recycling bins for tourists and takes his rubbish concerns to his community board. The pride he shows in his community is to be commended, in fact highly commended.

Richard and Linda Pickering - highly commended

Richard and Linda are also adopt-a-spot volunteers. Their tenure is not as long as Robert’s but their input has been amazing. Not content to just pick up the litter as often as they can they regularly get in touch with our co-ordinator so she can follow up issues in a timely manner. Their proactiveness has enabled several issues to be brought to the attention of the right authorities.

Contact Energy – highly commended

Contact Energy is one of the businesses that gives back to our community. They allow staff to use a work day to do some good. We are very fortunate that each year this large group of diligent workers choose to help to keep Dunedin clean. They are an inspiration to other businesses and we thank them for their lead in this.

Volunteering Otago – highly commended

Some recipients are repeat “offenders” and Volunteering Otago is one of those, particularly the youth division under Heather Moore’s guidance. Heather runs free holiday programmes several times a year for students and includes clean-ups as part of each programme. She is passionate about keeping our environment clean and through her holiday programmes passes on this passion and understanding to a large group of students.

Noel Jhinku – highly commended

Last year Noel’s group, called Our Seas our Future, won our supreme award for organising, advertising and holding many beach clean-ups. He continues to do this with events such as The Adopt a Coast project where he educates students on our marine system and either follows up or begins the session with a clean-up. Noel has just completed a beach clean-up as part of national Seaweek. It is great to do a clean-up, but Noel’s efforts in educating others about our need to care for our environment are to be applauded.

Fraser Brown – highly commended

Fraser has been known to KDB for years as he always attends and volunteers at our annual Trees for Babies planting. It is not for this reason, however, that he is being recognised. Fraser, like most of us, hates litter caused by one-use plastic bags. He hates it so much that he set up a stall at university where students could get a free environmentally friendly cloth bag in exchange for a used plastic one. During the exchange, and through his visual collection, he was able to educate many students on saying no to plastic bags. After this project Fraser agreed to join KDB as our youth representative. We took his great idea on board and during O week, with Fraser’s help, we managed to keep the topic of saying no to plastic bags on the minds of many students.

Purakaunui Amenities Society – highly commended

Our co-ordinator first became aware of this group through an ad in the paper calling for volunteers to help beautify the area and erect a track. She became curious so went to take a look for herself and was really blown away by the amount of work that had been done. After many volunteer weekends and much behind-the-scenes work Purakaunui has a community asset to be proud of. They have built a walking track more than 300m long, planted native trees, cut back weeds and placed seats along the way to take in the amazing view.

Silverstream School – highly commended

Like Fraser, the students at Silverstream hate plastic bags. So what to do about it? Why not use something that is no longer being used and turn it into something useful. And so pillow case reusable bags were made. The students were learning that not all economic growth is positive and that we can grow, but still be sustainable. Each class was tasked to take a used product and turn it into something usable. They made items like photo frames out of magazines, pot plants out of milk bottles and turned bread bags into lunch bags. This was a great initiative that the children will no doubt carry into their adult years.

Dive Otago – highly commended

Like Noel, their passion is the ocean. They dive in it and do not like diving amongst rubbish. So rather than hope someone else will do something about it, they continually hold harbour clean-ups. Once again the co-ordinator was fortunate enough to witness last year’s clean-up. The divers didn’t just stay in one spot and dive for half an hour and say the job is done. Instead, they drove the entire length of the harbour dropping divers at various locations to dive for extended periods of time and then carried the huge amount of debris away.

AKO Childcare Centre – third place

The centre sent us a folder depicting all the improvements they had made in their centre over a three-year period. The transformation was indeed amazing from a basic piece of land to a well-manicured site. They took every care to transform the centre into one that includes native plants, vegetable gardens, water and rock gardens, herb gardens and a sensory garden. What the judges were most impressed with was the way the children were so involved in the process and that through this inclusion they have been, and continue to be, educated in the need to take care of their environment and make it into an even more beautiful place than when they found it.

Marcus and Maree Johnstone and Beverley and Tony Perry – second place

Second prize is shared between two neighbouring families who took it upon themselves to beautify Sligo Terrace over many years. Between them they cleared rubbish, pulled out invasive weeds, built rock walls, procured and planted natives, flowers and grasses all at no cost to ratepayers. Much dedication and hard work has gone into this large-scale, multi-year beautification project. We thank them for their work, but also in their role modelling for others to follow.

Portobello Community Inc - Taylor Community Pride Shield

This group has been around for many years. Each year they not only maintain beautification projects, but continue to make their community an even more beautiful place to live in and to visit. Some of the projects include creating a garden township adjacent to the public toilets. This project, and the planting next to the hotel, include low-growing native plants to allow for light and also used recycled timber from the old jetty. The group also regularly do clean-ups which include the wider community. Such is their dedication they even did one on Mother’s Day in preparation for the Peninsula challenge. They are an inspiring group led by Paul Pope who we are also very happy to welcome on board our Keep Dunedin Beautiful committee.

The Brockville Community Development Project - Pod

Over the years Keep Dunedin Beautiful has been fortunate to work with individuals and groups in the Brockville area. They have always been a proactive community and never more so than this year. When we discussed painting bus shelters in their area they were full of ideas to promote a sustainable future, as that is their long-term vision. When one of these shelters was vandalised a neighbour quickly adopted and protected it. They organised several large-scale community clean-ups and encouraged people to continue to keep the neighbourhood clean. Through the Brockville Ecological Sustainability team they built and planted out a community garden. This group is to be commended on their community pride and care for the environment.

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