Te Hōnonga a Iwi: Restoring Rosedale Park is a social and environmental restoration project that uses sustainability and regenerative agricultural principles to increase the wellbeing of our local people, park and stream. We work in partnership with iwi, and over 65 local organisations from the sports, education, commercial, NGO and community sectors to convert 10 000 m2 weed infested land into native bush. In a move to develop landscape scale change, we created an Albany Basin trapping programme. In 2024, we built a community food garden using waste food scraps from hockey, vertical agriculture and inclusive designs to ensure all our people can garden if they wish to and our community has ready access to free, fresh organic fruit and vegetables.
Harbour Hockey aims to be Waste Zero by 2027. We are keen to reduce pollution and our carbon footprint to ensure a cleaner, greener future for our people and the planet. From May 2025, we are diverting our organic waste from landfill to make compost. Our aim is that this will be sold by players to reduce hockey costs and anything that is surplus to our needs will be used in the new community food garden and Te Hōnonga a Iwi restoration to increase soil health. As well as reducing our waste management costs, selling compost and separating metal from recyclables allows us to bring in funds.
We are proud to work in partnership with Auckland Council to mitigate and manage our waste.
Harbour Hockey is committed to increasing diversity to ensure all people are welcome at our place. Our partnership with Ngāti Whātua o Kaipara and commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi ensures Māori representation at every level of the organisation. In 2021, we worked with Diversity Works to do a stocktake of what we do well and how we can ensure inclusion. In 2022, we ran a Hockey Without Limits programme and in 2023 we undertook the Pride Pledge. We were the first sports association in New Zealand to take the pledge to promote equity regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Hockey is an awesome intergenerational game. We get real joy from witnessing whānau who have two or three generations of their people playing hockey. Celebrating our people’s cultures is important. We appreciate enabling players from Fun Sticks, the President's grade competition, and hosting events for diverse hockey teams to play the game they love at our place.
Harbour Hockey aspires to support the health and wellbeing of our players, whānau, staff and local community. Our home is special, and we invite our community to share it with us. The Hikoi for Health will offer opportunities to walk within our perimeter and links to local bike paths on the perimeter of our facility. Developing a community hub that enables people to exercise for free in well lit, safe surrounds maximises the use of our world class facilities including the bar and café. Supporting our people to explore and learn about our rohe promotes a sense of belonging and is particularly helpful for people new to Albany to enable them to find their way.
We believe our current and future stakeholders expect us to be courageous and ambitious as we work hard to decrease our impact on the climate, environment, families, our community and our organisation. Harbour Hockey has an ambition to become Net Zero by 2030, 20 years before Auckland hopes to achieve the goal. It is the right thing to do morally, and as a business, to reduce our carbon emissions. As such, sustainability continues to be a part of our strategy. Achieving Net Zero frees us up to focus on creative solutions for climate adaptation and becoming regenerative or climate positive. Future funders, sponsors and business partners, as well as our hockey whānau, will benefit from our future readiness and fitness.
Transportation to and from sporting commitments is carbon heavy. We are exploring ways to encourage our hockey whānau to reduce transport emissions. In 2024, we supported the upcycling and repairing of bikes from our local waste stream to enable free access to practice cycling using the local bike paths. With 7 schools linked to hockey by bike and walking paths, and one of Aotearoa’s largest business improvement districts at our front door, we hope to encourage the use of bikes or walking to and from our place. We are pleased to work in partnership with Kaipatiki Project and Auckland Council to achieve our sustainable transport goals.
Sustainable development focuses on increasing social equity, enhancing environmental health and promoting business resilience. Sustainable actions are highly integrated and involve systems-based approaches that are complex and difficult to express in words. We have developed impact models to help tell our sustainability story.
