Over the past two years, over 600 people, 29 community and government organisations, students and businesses came together to help address the question: How can Napier embrace people of all cultures and ensure everyone feels valued?
Napier City Council now wants to know what the wider community thinks of its Draft Multicultural Strategy 2025-30.
The draft strategy, Whiria Ahuriri, Weaving Together The People Of Napier, is now open for community consultation. The strategy sets out how Napier can ensure all residents feel welcome and included. It goes beyond celebrating multiculturalism and aims to increase social cohesion.
Napier Mayor Richard McGrath says feedback from residents will ensure the strategy meets the city’s needs. “We want to hear from people from many different cultures. Whether you’re a fifth-generation kiwi or you’ve been here less than a year, it’s important that we hear from diverse voices. The different backgrounds and experiences people bring make our city, our community and our council stronger.”
The Draft Strategy includes five priority areas: community connection and cohesion, cultural expression and pride, wellbeing and safety, access and support, and engagement and participation. The priority areas were developed after conversations with many groups within Napier, before the Strategy was drafted.
“This Multicultural Strategy came from the community,” says Mayor McGrath. “People came along to workshops, had conversations, put in their time and ideas, and helped build something solid and now we are asking our whole community what they think.”
Napier City Council is the lead agency for Whiria Ahuriri. Once it’s finalised and adopted by Council, staff will work with various community groups and public agencies to put it into action.
Submissions can be made on sayitnapier.nz until Friday 21 November.
Pray tell, why is strategy necessary? Here’s two lines that can save all that $, time and effort:
Be inclusive. Treat others how you want to be treated.
Done.
Words to live by.
And to those that don’t treat you well, karma is a bitch, and she gets then in the end. Kirsten, just saying. Mic drop.
If you look at the evidence from other countries, you can see that multiculturalism always fails. The UK, for example, has devolved into many different cultures, living in parallel existence. If this is the future, it will be a challenge to deal with. I don’t know the answer.
Greg…. Did you put your name forward to represent your community at the last election? Have you been prepared to subject yourself to all kinds of public comment, often vile and personal? Have you dedicated your time day in , day out, attending countless community meetings?
Well, Kirsten Wise did for the past decade. And in the scheme of things was a competent, hard working leader.
Greg… in your words treat others as you would want to be treated….just saying!
Yup, that person is saying “treat others as you want to be treated”, but making an exception for women with different views to his own. There is an increase in abuse of women in public positions.
A strategy is needed and not just for Napier- check out the vote regarding Maori wards to see just how inclusive our population is!
Exactly just more time and money wasted on woke engineering for nothing!
I’ll be interested to look over the MultiCultural Strategy and see if it is inclusive of disabled and elderly people too, because everything is intersectional. Thanks to all who put in the mahi!
Hi Neil, voted for you but have to agree with Greg, this strategy isn’t needed. And, to be fair to Greg, Kirsten was known for not being particularly inclusive if she didn’t agree with the her constituents, she pushed ahead with a lot of unnecessary bs over her time. It is one of the many reasons she is no longer Mayor of Napier. Greg has a right to say his peace, which I don’t think was particularly ‘vile’ at all. Peter, agree, UK is a prime example. We can all live together but it shouldn’t be at the expense of others. Otherwise we are inviting separatism. We can all live together as one, embracing culture. Or do we want to fight those who are different to us and have different rules for everyone? Animal Farm begins.
I thought we were focusing on the city’s infrastructure. These nice to do initiatives simply cloud that focus and waste ratepayers money. And it will achieve nothing. People either get along with each other or they don’t. You can’t engineer friendliness and cooperation.
Paul Temple
Some 35 year ago we emigrated with our young family to this country, never ever expecting for ‘the locals’ to have to ‘adjust’ to our culture; we saw it as our job to integrate and merge ‘seamlessly” in the Kiwi culture. That’s one of the reason we didn’t seek out other emigrants from the same country, actually we more or less ‘avoided’ them not to fall into the trap of creating a ‘mini-home-like’ cluster. If we wanted a copy of our old homeland we would have stayed there.