An added benefit for leaders on the NSC executive (the group that leads the NSC) has been the enhanced relationship building that has arisen from the collaboration that occurs.
The NSC executive identifies areas of common interest and advocates for regional co-operation on sports issues. Also, over the past few years, both play and active recreation have become part of the conversation at NSC level rather than just sport by itself, which has added to the benefits of the coalition.
Eight years have passed since the establishment of the group, and I think it is fair to say excellent progress has been made.
The NSC has driven collaboration among codes on projects such as Good Sports, Balance is Better, St John’s service at Kensington Park for winter codes, establishing the Northland Sports Governance Chair’s Forum, creating a collaborative working group to look at the overlapping of sports seasons, attracting funding to employ a resource to support RSOs to make changes to their sport to ensure they are more inclusive of Māori and working with Sport Northland to lead the development, and now implementation, of Kōkiri ai te Waka Hourua — the regional play, active recreation and sport strategy for Tai Tōkerau.
At a recent NSC executive hui, representatives came together to discuss, among other things, the finalisation of their annual plan for the 2023-24 year.
In alignment with the Kōkiri strategy, the following key pillars now form the bulk of this plan for the next 12 months:
- Shared Services — focus on coach development with invested regional sports codes.
- School/sport partnership — understand each other’s structures and processes to in turn enable an understanding of how mutual support can occur.
- Inclusion — support sports codes to increase diversity and inclusion across their operations.
- Communication — develop the most effective platform for information sharing.
- Facilities — fine-tune the regional facilities inventory tool and advocate for the Regional Sporting Facilities Rate to be re-struck.
- Hauora — promote and improve health and wellbeing in our sporting communities with multi-agency partners.
The NSG Chair’s Forum was also held recently with a focus on integrity in sports (specifically how sports codes can improve their judicial hearing processes) and how to continue the momentum of the increased diversity and inclusion that each sports code has made over the past 12 months.
They say true collaboration is difficult and therefore needs commitment and patience from all those involved — given what is occurring at the Northland Sports Coalition and Northland Sports Governance forums, I think it is fair to say both are well on the way to being truly collaborative.
