Thousands of regional seasonal employers (RSE) workers arrive in Nelson Tasman per year from the Pacific Islands, and the mahi by one organisation for them to bear fruit has been recognised.
Nelson Tasman Pasifika Community Trust picked up the Manaaki Award at the recent Horticulture New Zealand RSE Conference at Mount Maunganui, for extending its education and health support services for the RSE community in the past four years.
Chief executive Rob Blake, who received the award on behalf of the organisation, says the gong was a “huge surprise” and commended the fruitful work by the trust’s people, particularly during the Covid-19 period.
“We supplied food parcels to our RSE community that was isolating, we held vaccination clinics for more than 300 per day, and the majority of those [patients] were RSE for vaccinations against Covid, MMR and the flu.
“We’ve helped our RSE population gain full driver’s licenses, and we’ve even helped with upskilling some of our local RSE members with computer literacy skills, and some have also been given a laptop once they’ve completed that course,” he adds.
“Our nurses help advocate for RSE at the hospital, sometimes there’ll be some medical terminology that they’re not quite clear on and our team can help just explain things which make it easily understandable for our RSE members.”
Rob says the trust’s success will be further cultivated in the coming months.
“We find that education is the key to prosperity, so we run after-school programmes and computer literacy programmes and things like that to help uplift and upskill our current Pasifika population here in Nelson.
“We’ve also had a lot of health clinics and vaccination drives… it’s important to ensure the health and well-being of all our people because if we know that our RSE community is healthy, they will be healthy when they go home as well.
“We’re going to have a community engagement project to see what our Pacific community wants… and we’re trying to look at creating a STEM programme designed for Pacific kids and possibly having a Pacific careers day.”
