We’re on the Radio!

Our team was very excited to have a special visitor at a recent Wicked Weeders session. The Project Tongariro, Greening Taupō, and Kids Greening Taupō teams had the amazing opportunity to be interviewed for RNZ’s “Our Changing World” podcast with Claire Concannon. As we got stuck into another session of weeding and restoration work, Clare was right there alongside us — microphone in hand, capturing the spirit of the work that we do. Our coordinators, some of the Wicked Weeders and our Senior Students had the opportunity to be interviewed and share their views.

Claire Concannon and the team at RNZ’s “Our Changing World” did an amazing job of pulling all of the interviews together and making a podcast that discusses the history of Project Tongariro, Greening Taupō, Kids Greening Taupō and Greening Taupō Day. This was a lot to cover - the story of the tragic helicopter accident that led to Project Tongariro, the move to urban restoration with Greening Taupō, then bringing the tamariki on board with Kids Greening Taupō. As she interviewed us, we were frantically preparing for our biggest event of the year, Greening Taupō Day, so she covered that too! It was a lot of content and Clare did an incredible job of getting it all to make sense in an accurate way. She managed to shine a light on the huge range of grassroots conservation and environmental education happening right here in Taupō while telling our story.

While Claire was in town, she also visited local expert, Nick Singers, and well known Project Tongariro volunteer, Shirley Potter, to see the amazing wetland restoration work that they have undertaken in Tauranga-Taupō. This fantastic success story was made into another podcast, ‘The Willows and the Wetland’.

These two podcasts are interesting to listen to and cover an incredible amount of information, but they they are pretty lengthy. We were really excited when Clare did an Interview with Jesse Mulligan on RNZ and discussed her time with us all here in Taupō. This interview is a great concise summary of the two podcasts for those who don’t have time to listen to them.

An article with links to both podcasts was released by RNZ too!

Thank you so much Claire, Jesse and the team from RNZ for taking the time to see the great work that we are doing here in Taupō and sharing it so beautifully and accurately with everyone else in Aotearoa.