Please help us support our Hawke's Bay community

Thank you for your support !

Our organisations strategic focus is developing resilient communities, adaptation and mitigation of climate change, environment restoration in Hawke’s Bay region.

At the start of the disaster response, we reached out to our networks for support i.e. Environment Hubs Aotearoa (EHA), Community Energy Network (CEN), Zero Waste Network (ZWN). Collectively we have more than 150 organisations under these networks. Our networks delivered! We received clothes, bedding, non-perishable food from all over New Zealand.

We also had more than 280 volunteers sign up with us to support our communities.

So far with your help we have:

• supported 64 communities throughout all 4 districts (Napier, Hastings, Wairoa, Central Hawke’s Bay) in Hawke's Bay with non-perishable food, toiletries, clothes, medicine, bedding, clothing, generators, defibrillators, star link satellite, tools, cleaning products and essentials

• facilitated more than 22,000 hot meals into the communities.

• We also opened our doors to the community to collect clothes, bedding and food directly

• had more than 280 new volunteers sign up and developed life long partnerships

• we got to communities that hadn’t been reached by helicopter, boat, four wheel drive, truck

• we set up a whole logistics team to do this. This is not our core business and we have never done this before. We have learnt a lot and will be more prepared for future climate disasters

We are continuing to work with 5 to 8 communities to distribute funds directly to vulnerable families in the communities in the form of food vouchers. We have not yet received these funds from Givealittle. But knowing that these funds were coming, we have dipped into our operations budget to cover support for our community outreach to achieve the outcomes above. This was to get out free hot community meals, non-perishable food, medicine, clothes, satellite links for communications, generators to community hubs, medical advice to 64 communities in the region.

We have also managed to get extra non-perishable food and clothes donations to extend the volume of communities we can support. We will use a maximum 30k of the Givealittle funds to reimburse the operations budget that was used to achieve this.

We will pass the remaining funds raised on Givealittle to families that have the deepest need/insufficient support in the form of food vouchers that we identify with community committees. As soon as we receive funds from Givealittle we will be begin distributing to communities in Rissington, Omahu, Pakowhai, Dartmoor, Puketapu, Puketitiri, Wairoa, Esk Valley. Recipients would have lost either their house (or they cannot live in their house at present due to damage) or income or both. We will also distribute a small proportion to 2 communities hubs to continue to provide food to two very effected communities.

Once the distribution has happened, we will update our page with the full story, stats and photos.

The Environment Centre/ Sustaining Hawke’s Bay Trust is a registered charity and has been in the community for more than 30 years. As a registered charity we are independently audited every year against contracts, grant criteria and in this case Givealittle criteria.

Watch the video to see more.......

Thank you for continuing to support our Hawke's Bay communities. All funds donated to this page will continue to be distributed in the way identified above. We are working on setting up another page for the rebuild / recovery we are doing to work on helping our communities transition to become more climate resilient and help environmental restoration.