FROM YOUR PAPER

New Zealanders are great givers to - and workers for - charity. I was thinking about this as a colleague prepares to set off to cycle the length of the South Island to raise funds for a cancer charity, Unicorn Foundation NZ, for a scanner to detect the type of cancer that killed Steve Jobs. He hasn’t ever cycled a long distance before but is training now to cycle around 650km in eight days.

And that is just one of the stories you hear about willing Kiwis. Every day you’ll see a poster for a school fair, hear of someone raising money, have people come to your door. We, in local papers, even sometimes struggle to cope with the number of requests for publicity for charities.

So we are a giving bunch. A report this year found Kiwis were ranked second in the world for how much we donate to charity each year, behind only the US.

So let’s hear it for the charity donors and the charity workers. The people who keep the wheels of giving going.