Neighbours Aotearoa 2023

Let's Share Kai with our Communities, 1 March - 1 April 2023! Every March, Neighbours Aotearoa offers a great opportunity to connect the people in your neighbourhood and community with your church. There are so many ways you can take part - it can be as big or small as you want to make it. This year, we're encouraging you to embrace the 2023 theme of Let's Share..  Kai with our Communities.

Read a message from the Moderator

Moderator Right Rev Hamish Galloway has sent a message of support for Neighbours Aotearoa to the Church. Download and read it in full here.

I love our Church theme for Neighbours month this year, Let's Share... Kai with our Communities. This is deeply Christian, this idea of sharing food and around a table. 

The Australian theologian and missiologist Mike Frost once commented that Christianity captured the Roman Empire not by sword but by table! What a wonderful thing to be captured by, the hubbub of neighbours sharing food together. This vision for hospitality, of reaching out inviting and including, is even more urgently needed in our communities following the shocking destruction of the recent floods and cyclone. 

I encourage you to see our Church website resources for parishes. These include an offer for our churches to enter a draw for supermarket gift cards, download a poster, get advice on how to set up a pataka kai, and examples of how our churches are sharing food and meals with their communities. I hope you are inspired and encouraged to find your own way to share kai with community this year...

Enter the draw: Supermarket Gift Cards for PCANZ Parishes

Is your parish involved in, or wants to begin, sharing kai with your community? We have 10x $50 supermarket vouchers to gift parishes to help you get started. You could could use these to:

  • Start a pataka kai parish community pantry, host or contribute to a foodbank, crop swap, community BBQ or pizza party, baking and sharing muffins on the street and outside your church, host a dinner / lunch / brunch / breakfast / morning tea / afternoon tea, drop off parish preserves to neighbours, organise a community picnic, potluck, fun ice cream beach day etc, 
  • We know that some parishes are involved in getting kai to communities affected by flooding and the devastating cyclone and we encourage you to apply to support your mahi.

Apply

Apply now to go into the draw for one of the 10x $50 supermarket gift cards we have to give away to PCANZ parishes. Gift cards must be used only to buy food to share with your communities. Groceries can be gifted directly by your church or via a foodbank or pataka kia, or can be used by your church to make food to share with your local community.

Enter the draw by emailing:

  • Your PCANZ parish name and a contact person
  • Your physical mailing address for the gift card to be sent to
  • How you will use the gift card in your parish's ministry outreach 
  • If you prefer a PAKnSave or New World gift card

Send to: angela@presbyterian.org.nz by 5pm, Tuesday 14 March.

Resources & Pataka Kai

Pataka Kai

  • PSN ADVICE: Start a Pataka Kai (a free help yourself community pantry) at your church. Email Anne Overton at Presbyterian Support Northern for advice.
  • PSN & NORTHERN PRESBYTERY: Read about the Pataka Kai initiative run by Presbyterian Support Northern and Northern Presbytery: Communities Feeding Communities.
  • HISTORY: Read about how Pataka Kai began.
  • CHARTWELL: Read about the Pataka Kai run by Chartwell Cooperating Church, Hamilton.

Read below inspiring stories on how PCANZ parishes, and Presbyterian Support Northern with Northern Presbytery, are sharing kai with communities

About Neighbours Aotearoa

Neighbours Aotearoa (formerly Neighbours Day Aotearoa) is a community development initiative dedicated to growing, connecting and strengthening neighbourhoods across the country. It is a place-based and local approach – neighbours linking up in their local communities. Each year in March they encourage everybody to do something small - or large! - to know a neighbour a bit better.

From humble beginnings in 2009, Neighbours Aotearoa has evolved and grown - initially being just one day, it then expanded to 10 days. In 2023, we will see the initiative span the entire month of March. Their vision is to see locally driven year-round activities, participation and organising that makes longer-term and more deeply ingrained changes to the social fabric of Aotearoa.