Celebrating Creative Volunteers

Ask around any city, town, village or neighbourhood, and you will find creative events and offerings that help people to connect with themselves, with others, and with their local places.

Check out the local town noticeboards, libraries, papers, tourism sites, and thingstodo, and you will find the kinds of things that make our places vibrant, interesting places to be. From workshops and classes, to performances, concerts, gigs, readings, exhibitions, to those annual special memories we look forward to: Christmas parades, arts trails, Matariki celebrations, school productions, festivals and more. Creative events help us to connect as communities and support us to thrive. 

Sometimes, these events receive public funding, or are supported by generous local businesses or philanthropists, or provided spaces or other in-kind support. This is essential support, and it contributes to beautiful impacts. 

In addition, creative events happen because of the thousands of hours donated by creatives and creative supporters. In all seasons, our people share their skills, knowledge and experience generously: fundraising, planning, promoting, serving on governance boards, funding applications and reporting, working front of house, cleaning spaces, checking tickets, administration, sewing costumes, postering for events, keeping the kettle hot, arriving early and staying late, and much more, all the while sharing the manaaki and awhi that makes our communities so special. People make our places warm and connected places to be. 

The biggest investment in community creativity across the motu comes from our creatives and creative community activators. Our creative ecosystem contributes volunteer hours, in-kind support, and provision of service above and beyond market rates. 

Many volunteers wear multiple hats in their communities too, giving to multiple kaupapa, and serve their communities over many years. 

Volunteers are the beating hearts of our communities, and Volunteering New Zealand shares that 89% of community organisations in Aotearoa are volunteer-run. It is important that we practice actively valuing these contributions, and remember the mahi that goes on, often behind-the-scenes. Our volunteers do important, people-centred work. 

We have created a friendly handbook around the importance of people in bringing great things to our communities. It is called People Make Place, and you can find it here. Tucked in its pages is a challenge we can each pick up: 

Make a joyful noise. It is important to celebrate the things that are working really well. You could give positive feedback to a venue, group or organiser who makes your life better. Bonus points if there is a way to share your message of support with others too. 

Sharing positive feedback with the people who serve our communities is a simple but powerful way to awhi their work, and provides evidence they can use to support their ongoing mahi. It might seem like a small thing to do, but it can have really big ripples. 

And sharing this feedback publicly helps to advocate for arts, culture and creativity more broadly – growing the wider understanding of the value of our ecosystem, and so growing public support. 

This June, let’s spend five minutes giving a shout out to the special people and organisations in our communities. 

He aha te mea nui o te ao? Māku e kī atu, he tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
What is the most important thing in this world? It is people, it is people, it is people.

And so, a final shout-out to our creative volunteers:

Thank you for the work you do, helping the Waikato region to thrive with creativity, connection and community. Mauri ora. 

Written by: Dr. Aimee Anderson-O’Connor, Creative Waikato team member