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Margaret Goff with Nigel Muir of Sport Tasman. Muir nominated Goff in 2019 for an Eelco Boswijk Civic Award for her work in setting up and running a welfare centre distributing food and products to families disrupted by the Pigeon Valley Fire.
It was meant to be just making “a few sandwiches” for crews during the Pigeon Valley fires, but Margaret Goff’s initiative grew much bigger than she expected, and earned her an award she had never heard of. In 2019, Goff won the Eelco Boswijk Community Hero Award for her hard mahi (work) coordinating a welfare centre set up of her own volition. The centre catered to the needs of those affected by the wildfires and supported the people involved in them, including firefighters, frontline crew and families who had homes threatened by the blaze.
“Along with the expensive entry fee, when you turn up at the event you are bombarded by corporate sponsorship. “If you re going to charge so much, is there a need to have so much corporate signage all round the venue and all over the t-shirts?”
MARTIN DE RUYTER
Participants in Nelson s Sanitarium Weet-Bix Kids TRYathlon gather in Tāhunanui s playing field for the event, normally held in March. Inequality was growing in sport overall, with “hefty” registration fees at sports clubs stopping some families signing up, McLean said. Youth sport should not be subsidising top athletes, he said. “I would have thought the emphasis would have been trying to get kids into sport, and making it affordable and cheap to get them in there.
Through the project about 4500 students were surveyed across the 15 colleges in the region. “College sport has seen some of this data where it has become too competitive and on the whole, college students are telling us ‘we want to do more, but we don’t fit the mould’,” Muir said. “If you re a good athlete and you fit the mould you re okay, but if you’re making up the numbers or you re not so good and don’t have so much confidence – something we see in a lot of our teenage girls in particular – where do you go?”
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