What is the Spaces and Places Strategy?
We all know the Bay of Plenty is a great place to live.
It has a fantastic climate and a large range of awesome natural environments that provide us with a huge variety of locations to participate in sport and recreation.
What's more, our population is growing, our demographics are changing and there are many new opportunities available for us to participate in sport and recreation.
However, as a region, we need to make sure that we have enough suitable man-made spaces and places available to meet the needs of our diverse communities.
The Bay of Plenty Spaces and Places Strategy is all about ensuring that any future developments do exactly that.
Single-purpose sporting clubs are struggling to keep their current facilities maintained, so groups that are in close vicinity of each other are looking at amalgamating in order to reduce overheads.
As a result, more multi-sport clubs are starting to appear.
These situations require a purpose-built facility that meets the needs of the various groups utilising it, while also ensuring it is accessible to all members of the community.
At Sport Bay of Plenty, we get asked by numerous sport and recreation organisations to provide advice and guidance around facility development - especially around how to go about approaching councils and what suitable funders are out there to request support from.
As all six of the region's councils have endorsed this Spaces and Places Strategy and its decision-making framework for sport and recreational providers to follow, this makes it easier for clubs to request assistance from local government for land or financial investment.
This framework also provides a transparent and consistent approach across the region that will help our volunteers and community organisations work through a clear step-by-step process to achieve their goals, and, in turn, give funders increased confidence to support any local sport and recreation project because they know it will have been through a robust evaluation and needs assessment.
