Tūpiki Trust June 2023 Newsletter
New Board Member
The NZAC Tūpiki Trust is pleased to welcome Sam Newton to our Board, strengthening the experience and knowledge of the team. Many of you will already know Sam from his time as General Manager of the Alpine Club or from his current role as Advocacy Manager at Recreation Aotearoa. There he manages the organisation’s Government Relations, ensuring the voice of recreation is heard at the highest levels of decision making in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Sam holds a Bachelor of Commerce, a Bachelor of Arts with Honours, and has been a recipient of the Sir Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship. He has worked in a variety of high-profile roles including as a Parliamentary Advisor, and has held a number of Board appointments, including as Chair of the Canterbury Aoraki Conservation Board, Deputy Chair of the New Zealand Mountain Safety Council and as Trustee of ACAT.
Sam is passionate about active recreation in the outdoors and has a wide variety of interests including rock climbing, mountaineering, ski touring, packrafting, and tramping. He also serves as an Officer in the New Zealand Army Reserve.
Funding to support climbing at Hillary Outdoors, Tongariro
If there is one organisation in Aotearoa known for its skill in getting young people climbing, it’s the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoors Education Trust, known to all of us as Hillary Outdoors.
That’s why the NZAC Tūpiki Trust is delighted to be able to support the Hillary Outdoors Tongariro Centre with a major grant to help them deliver the next level of teaching and climbing experience to thousands of young people each year. Getting young people climbing is at the heart of our Trust’s Kaupapa, and this project offered us an opportunity to make a long term contribution to achieving that outcome.
In 2020 Hillary Outdoors embarked on a three phase project to create a top-quality climbing training facility for tertiary students at a total cost of $ 773,289.
Hillary Outdoors delivers both the New Zealand Certificate (Level 4) and the New Zealand Diploma (Level 5) in Outdoor and Adventure Education from at its Tongariro Centre and at the core of the tertiary programme is the climbing qualification. Twenty-five percent of each course (Certificate and Diploma) or 300 hours is dedicated to climbing – both rock and alpine. The NZAC Tūpiki Trust is supporting phase 3 of that Climbing Programme project and has approved $250,539 co-funding which will enable construction of an all-weather indoor wall for the Centre
Because courses are often hampered by weather which can disrupt schedules and the momentum created in the classroom, funding for an all-weather facility has been high priority. Tūpiki Trust funding for an indoor high spec climbing wall will allow highly technical lessons as well as learning alongside instructors to be delivered in a safe and controlled environment. The $773,289 project provides a climbing facility for teaching all skills associated with climbing, from movement skills through to many technical skills (belaying, anchors, abseiling, multi-pitch systems).
As part of the training facility, the grant provided by Tūpiki Trust will enable the creation of a dedicated classroom for the tertiary programme that will be next to the climbing wall so that learners can apply what is covered in theory almost immediately in practice.
Climbing equipment provided under this donation is for high-use items which are essential to have on hand to operate at the safest standard. Tūpiki Trust funding will enable Hillary Outdoors to purchase different sized climbing gear to ensure safety of their clients and tertiary programme students.
We look forward to collaborating on this project to support and sustain the development of safe climbing education and practice in Aotearoa through the Hillary Outdoors tertiary programme and future newsletter will report progress on the project this year and student successes into the years ahead.
Aspiring Hut Project Success
The NZAC owned Aspiring Hut project is now complete and the newly refurbished lodge is open for business and already exceeding expectations. NZAC General Manager Karen Leacock has just written to Tūpiki Trust expressing her gratitude to the Trust for our support with this project. “As you know, the project costs escalated from our original estimates and with the support of the Trust we were still able to complete the hut to a very high standard. Having the support of the Trust and the trustees really did make a huge difference and we are enormously grateful”. Feedback from DOC is that the hut is being very well used and there are lots of family groups taking advantage of the upgraded facilities. “I don't think we could have hoped for a better outcome, Karen wrote.
The Otago Section of the Alpine Club have already booked the entire hut for a Matariki Celebration in July and will use the hut as a base for a long weekend of climbing.
If you’d like more detail about this project, and what was done to make the alpine taonga even better than before, we have added the NZAC’s Aspiring Hut Refurbishment booklet to our website, and you can read it here .
Another great Mature Mountaineers event.
Roger Bates’s adventuring life drew a huge crowd to the Wellington Mature Mountaineers talk early in June. Wellington NZAC chair Andy Carruthers welcomed the attendees who were entertained by Roger’s anecdotes from his memoirs ‘The Peaks in My Life’ and from mountaineering tales and stories of his many outdoor activities.
Roger joined the Tararua Tramping Club as an enthusiastic 18-year-old and went on to be a very accomplished mountaineer, climbing all of Aotearoa’s 3,000 metre peaks, Yerupajá in Peru and making successful climbs in Europe with Graeme Dingle.
The next Wellington Mature Mountaineers meeting will be on 7 September, Tararua Tramping Club Rooms, 4 Moncrief Street, Mount Victoria at 2pm when the Tūpiki Trust’s own Geoff Gabites will discuss “The Golden Age of Mountaineering” which he is convinced was from 1968 to 1975.
Mature Mountaineer meetings are a NZ Alpine Club initiative providing an opportunity for older members of the NZAC to get together, share and hear stories (usually from an invited speaker), and have afternoon tea. The intention is to provide a social gathering for those less likely to go out to evening events. The concept has been successful in Dunedin, Christchurch (since 2006), Auckland and, more recently, Wellington. The functions are open to all interested outdoor enthusiasts and are made possible thanks to support from NZAC Tūpiki Trust.
Tūpiki Trust Grants near $1,000,000 total
Since our launch in 2021, the Trust has now completed three grant rounds and provided support for 14 projects, totalling almost $1 million. These are listed below, to give an indication of the breadth of support that we have been able to provide, thanks to the generosity of our donors.
1 New Zealand Alpine Club $370,294.08 Aspiring Hut rebuild
2. Southern Lakes Sanctuary Trust $122,935 Young Valley biodiversity
3. Leaning Lodge Trust $25,000 Leaning Lodge Hut rebuild
4. Greenstone TV $143,360 Innovative climbing documentary
5. Aspiring Biodiversity Trust $16,635 Alpine weather data programme
6. Ben Shunfenthal $4,569.17 Castledowns rebolting
7. New Zealand Alpine Club $23,199.29 ClimbNZ redevelopment
8. Heritage Hokitika $3,450 ”Climber Douglas” reprint
9. NZ Mountain film festival $1,000 Adventure writing workshop
10. Backcountry Trust $8,000 South Luxley biv renovation
11. Aotearoa 25 $10,000 “History of climbing” research
12. Hillary Outdoors $250,000 Climbing wall construction
13. New Zealand Alpine Club $10,000 Webshop development
14. Backcountry Trust $20,000 Whitbourn Bridge
Total $1,008,981.54
Preparing for the next Grant Round.
If you have a project which meets the NZAC Tūpiki Trust’s objectives and you believe it has the potential to make a difference to climbing in New Zealand, then it may be time to start thinking about applying for a grant. We accept applications at any time and consider these twice a year at our meetings in March and September – except in special circumstances when immediate grants may be considered.
The Tūpiki Trust publishes everything you need to know about our grant process on our website at www.tupikitrust.org.nz . We are working to streamline the process a little and to simplify the documents you need to submit and these updates will be complete prior to the 2023 September grants round. But if you wish to use the existing material, you are welcome to do so now; just make sure that your application shows how your project will meet the Trust’s objectives, how you are planning to provide in cash, kind or effort at least 50% of the project’s costs and ensure that ALL costs are shown as GST INCLUSIVE
Contact details
The NZAC Tūpiki Trust
P O Box 786,
Christchurch
03 377 7595
Margaret Fyfe – Patron
Ross Cullen – Chair
Geoff Gabites
Dave Bamford
Lindsay Smith
Clare Kearney
Sam Newton