WHO ARE WE?
Ki te mea ka taka te kākano ki te wāhi e tika ana ka tinaku, ā, ka pihi ake he tipu hou.
If a seed falls in the right place it will germinate and a new seedling will sprout.
PiPS was formed in 2016 by a group of school parents in the Pāpāmoa Beach/Mt Maunganui area of Aotearoa New Zealand, who are passionate about demonstrating, to our children and their families, the principles of kaitiakitanga: respect and care for the environment and an understanding of how to grow our own food.
Our work IN SCHOOLS
Within the school environment one of the most effective ways we can live these values is through a school garden – planning, preparing, growing, harvesting, cooking and eating. To do these things we need to cooperate, problem-solve, share and learn together in so many ways.
However, sustaining a school garden places a heavy workload on management, teachers and parent volunteers. Initial enthusiasm may wane, key volunteers may move on, problems may arise that the school has neither time or resources to tackle.
We worked to find a way around these challenges, to make it easier for a school garden to become a permanent and contributing part of our schools’ environments. Our solution was to form PiPS, an inter-school collective, which employs part-time garden facilitators to work across our member schools, overseeing our garden programmes and other associated projects within the schools and our wider community.
Our Facilitators:
– Work with school management, teachers, volunteers and supporters, co-ordinating each school’s garden programme, providing structure, organisation, information and materials.
– Work within each school to help integrate environment-based projects into the learning space, supporting and advising teachers in the classrooms.
– Help retain continuity, so that when staff or volunteers move on, our school gardens don’t fall into disorganisation.
– Act as a centralised knowledge base, providing a link between our schools so that information and ideas can be exchanged and shared.
– Help to encourage interaction between the school and the wider community through gardening and environmental projects.
– Work with whatever learning framework each school chooses to put in place for their garden programmes, and support whatever projects are going on at each school.
The facilitators’ wages are partly funded by the member schools, and partly by fundraising, grants and sponsorships sought by PiPS. PiPS also fundraises for equipment to help our member schools to build and maintain their gardens and garden programmes.