Kaitiakitaka in Open Valley Urban Ecosanctuary
Open Valley Urban Ecosanctuary (Open VUE) relies on volunteers to provide support by offering their time, skills, and expertise. There are many wonderful ideas coming from the residents to promote and increase biodiversity within the Valley. However, as with most volunteer-based organisations, Open VUE has quite a few challenges associated with getting these ideas to fruition due to low volunteer turnout.
Funded by The Otago Museum Trust Board Curious Minds platform, Open VUE launched a participatory science project in June 2024 called Kaitiakitaka in Open Valley Urban Ecosanctuary. The goal is to sustainably continue community-led conservation in an effort to expand biodiverse spaces for our wonderful native populations. In this social science project, students from DNI worked with Open VUE, University advisors, and Social Impact Studio to create a survey that investigated the motivations and attitudes around community volunteering for local conservation projects within North East Valley.
A big thank you to all who participated in our recent survey; we were able to garner quite a bit of information from our community.
In addition to gaining an understanding of some of our community’s reasons for wanting to participate in local conservation volunteering and what they believe are the benefits to North East Valley, we also learned what prevents them from being able to participate. It should come as no surprise that the top two responses were “lack of time” and “occurs when unavailable”. However, the third most popular reason was “a lack of information,” which is something we can definitely work on! We also gathered responses from community members on the best way to disseminate information regarding volunteer opportunities with Open VUE. Our top one was “social media”. Followed closely behind by “email” and “Valley Voice.” We also received some other interesting ideas of “banners at the site” and “radio advertisement.” If you have any other ideas on how to get information out to the community regarding volunteer opportunities or you’d like to sign up to our volunteer list, please contact us at OpenVUE@northeastvalley.org or call 473 8614.
