Pat Magill, in yellow T-shirt, out walking with friends in 2016. Photo / NZME
Pat Magill, in yellow T-shirt, out walking with friends in 2016. Photo / NZME
International Children's Day will be celebrated in Napier on Saturday with both talking and walking, and 95-year-old social justice battler Pat Magill.
In a link between the Napier City Council and the Napier Pilot City Trust, the talking will be done at a "thinkfest 21" child, youth and wellbeing workshopon Napier's future as a city raising its children. The event is being held at the War Memorial Centre on Marine Parade, from 9.30am to 12.30pm.
The walking will be in the trust's annual Unity Walk, on the Parade from opposite Sale St to the Sound Shell Parade, and starting at 1pm.
Inveterate trust stalwart and social justice campaigner Magill will be there but said it will be his last after more than three decades of Unity walks, the longest from Taupo to Napier in New Zealand's sesquicentennial year 1990.
Among Magill's targets has been challenging the city council to make Napier a child-friendly city under an accord struck by Unicef and pilot city trust secretary and former high school principal Mark Cleary said thinkfest 21 "signals the beginning of our child and youth wellbeing strategy conversation".
It is designed for rangatahi from primary school and secondary school age, in some cases likely to be children or grandchildren of people who have accompanied Magill on his walks in the past.
Cleary says the Unity walks - Me Hikoi Kia Kotahi Ai - are part of the "lifeblood" of both Magill and the Napier Pilot City Trust.
"Pat believes this will be his last hikoi, he wants us to remember 'foot soldiers' who have walked in the past and are no longer with us or are unable to walk," Cleary says.
Among them were Te Ōtane Reti, Jim Morunga, Mo Ropitini, Polly Fairbrother and "especially" Minnie Ratima, the 2017 Hawke's Bay Today Person of the Year who died in August 2020.
