Working with community groups and young people to care for our environment.
The ARO project invites groups to Assess, Reduce and Offset their environmental impact while creating positive outcomes for young people and communities.
The Story
Praxis was challenged that our organization could do better in caring for the environment — not just in preparing youth workers for working in a changing climate, but in the organization’s real impacts on the environment.
Aro is the moko of Lloyd Martin (Founder of Praxis).
Aro inspired our ARO project. For us, she personifies the connection and responsibility we feel towards the next generation. Our young people will inherit a world with significant environmental challenges that they have contributed very little towards. The ARO project believes that the act of mitigating problems like climate change should resource and empower the communities and people who will be at the frontline of this crisis.
We invite you to join us in responding to the climate crisis
Through the ARO project a group of church and community organisations in Aotearoa NZ are partnering with Praxis in doing our bit for the planet. The three challenges of ARO are:
Assess — Become aware of the impact our organisation is having on the environment, and raise awareness among young people we work with.
Reduce — Find ways to reduce our impact on the environment by reducing waste and making better use of our natural resources.
Offset — Support projects that both reduce our carbon emissions and involve young people in the process.
Each year the Praxis team and students complete practical projects with young people to reduce waste and restore natural environments.
Projects
The initiatives we support are normally coordinated by youth and community workers, or by young people themselves. They seek to improve the local environment while improving the global situation; by planting vegetation to absorb carbon emissions, reducing or recycling waste, restoring a natural ecosystem, or helping a community change a practice that is bad for the environment.
We invite community groups who are developing environmental projects with young people to contact us to discuss how to get involved.
Aro Day 2024
Each year at Praxis our team and students set aside a day for talanoa, learning and mahi on the land. There are many creative responses to the environmental crisis, and the range of events at our ARO days across the country reflected this.
Christchurch
In an effort to Assess, Reduce and Offset our environmental impact, Year 1 & 2 Christchurch Praxis students spent a day out in our community.
First we visited the Climate Action Campus (CAC) located at the former Avonside High School - the first of its kind in Aotearoa. CAC works with a number of different community groups and schools to educate young people on all aspects of climate change and environmental and ecological development issues. Our Praxis group spent the morning weeding an area on campus which is currently being prepared for the arrival of Boulder Copper Butterflies. These are endemic to New Zealand and are one of our smallest butterflies.
During the second half of our day, we went to Rowley Primary School to plant some trees. With the help of a few students, we collected old tires and together planted over 30 trees around the newly built bike track. A few of us also spent time collecting rubbish around the grounds.
Whanganui
On the 4th of June, the Whanganui Praxis crew went to Shannon to meet some awesome people and get our hands dirty. This place is called Te Pamu Papaku (the humble farm). Here, they like to live in the land. These families' houses are called earth houses and are completely made by them with as much of their own natural resources as they could. They even made their own bricks with clay they found on their land. We all enjoyed spending time listening to the stories and challenges, but we also enjoyed getting to work. Some of us spent time in the garden “digging for gold” (potatoes) and others of us helped to transfer sod onto a new earth house roof. We learned that this was to help with insulation and drainage. There was a lot of teamwork and laughs. It was an amazing experience where we were introduced to another way of living. We all learnt how important it is to live off the land and to be in community through that.
Wellington
ARO Day 2024 started off at Hongoeka Marae to do some work on the puke near the marae and the gardens beds around the outside of the property. We were joined by the students at Praxis Education Kenepuru (PEK) and Aro herself! There we ended up doing some general weeding, tidying, and planting native plants on both the puke and the gardens. Afterwards, we headed off to PEK and helped them do some tidying, removing a significant amount of gorse around the property. A personal highlight for me was spending time with the PEK students and Aro, it was really cool to be able to get to know the rangatahi some of our classmates work with and just yarn with them in the environment of active participation, good vibes, doing stuff for local iwi with them. Another highlight was listening to the generational goals from one of the kaitiaki Luke Barnsley, hearing him talk about aspirations of re-establishing environmental biodiversity between Mana Island, Titahi Bay, and Plimmerton was very inspiring and made me feel very motivated to contribute in whatever way I could that day. Overall, while a lot of hard work and establishing a strong disdain for gorse, ARO day was another practical reminder of the power of getting stuck in with youth in looking after the whenua, and the role we play in being able to establish ARO-like projects and initiatives in our own youth work contexts.
