PŪNIU RIVER CARE INC. OPEN DAY!

This event will give people an opportunity to come visit us at our nursery and learn about our experiences and journey from the beginning to where we are now. We will have our staff on board to help answer any questions you may have so that you can go back to your whānau and begin the conversation of your own Marae-based taiao restoration initiatives.

Our first Open Day for PRC 2019. The purpose of this day was to open our doors and invite all of our funders, whānau and communtiy to come along and see who we are and what we do.  We also had a copy of our marae-based restoration guide for everybody which was just completed in September. This guide was written to assist marae and hapū to increase their capacity in restoration and is a free resource for Marae who are looking into taiao restoration.

Starting the day with a little blessing of rain, our manuwhiri were welcomed into the whare – Te Maru o Ihoa. After morning tea and registrations, we kicked off with a few presentations and guest speakers; Sam Judd from Sustainable Coastlines, Alan Bryant who is a landowner on the Pūniu and a couple of awesome students from Te Wharekura o Ngā Purapura o Te Aroha kindly put their hand up to speak at the last minute.

A successful day made possible with the help of funding through Waikato-Tainui’s Taiao Grant, an awesome group of volunteers from Te Wharekura o Ngā Purapura o Te Aroha, our whānau vollunteers and all of our kaimahi at PRC.

The importance of Kai

Providing good kai for our manuwhiri is a an important part of who we are as māori so a day before our open day, Shannon took a team out on the water to go diving and fishing.  A successful day bought back lots of kina and a big king fish for the centre of our kai table! A gift from Tangaroa himself. The background details of collecting our kai is sometimes missed or forgotten about so we put a video together of the team to show how we do the mahi from the sea to the table!

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