This week Sport Canterbury will officially launch their Women & Girls Strategy.

With a vision of an equitable physical activity system for all wāhine that is safe, understanding, and enables them to unleash their full potential, Sport Canterbury - Lead Provider for Healthy Families Ōtautahi - embarked on a Women & Girls Strategy  Additionally, the intended outcome is to ensure more women and girls are engaged, valued, and visible in all aspects of sport, active recreation and play.

In order to form the Strategy, a working group met regluarly, opting to adopt a Systems Change approach to guide the development of the strategy and action plans. Being immersed in the field of systems change already, Healthy Families Ōtautahi helped lead a series of Systems Change workshops to help develop the strategy and subsequent action plans.

The groups found using the Six Conditions of System Change highly beneficial - “by providing us with a framework to follow, this process gave us a guide that helped us identify priorities and understand the interrelation between different conditions. As a result, we were able to address all the issues in our action plans without feeling overwhelmed, thanks to the structure it provided." - Participation team.

Alongside foundation values, six strategic intents were set by the group, ensuring wāhine are valued at all level of sport and receation:

- Honour their obligations to Te Tiriti and Māori wāhine;
- Ensure an equity lens is applied for all women and girls in everything they do;
- Share insights to educate and identify barriers to help make informed decisions and support or encourage others to collect further information relevant to wāhine.
- Promote, recognise and support all the work that is being done for and with Women & Girls in sport, active recreation, play and physical activity across our region;
- Increase women and girls’ participation in governance, leadership, coaching, officiating, and volunteering roles across all levels in our sector to encourage women and girls to participate in physical activity; and
- Advocate for women and girls in governance and leadership, coaching, officiating, volunteering roles and participating in physical activity.

On Thursday September 14, the Women & Girls Strategy will officially be launched to a capacity audience, in Ōtautahi Chirstchurch – three inspiring guest speakers, including Sophie Moloney (CEO of Sky New Zealand), will talk to each of the above strategic priorities, sharing their experiences and knowledge in a presentation and Q&A session. There will be opportunities throughout the event for women across all sporting codes and organisations in Canterbury to connect and share.

“The Sport Canterbury, Women and Girls Strategy Launch, is a great opportunity to share our commitment, as an organisation, to ensure positive systems are in place for wāhine to be engaged, valued and visible in all aspects of the sport, active recreation and play”, says Geni Ah Tong, Manager of Healthy Families Ōtautahi, and who has led the launch organising committee.

For more information on the launch event, check out eventbrite.

Article added: Monday 11 September 2023