WE SAY

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 which killed Steve Jobs. He hasn’t ever cycled a long distance before but is training now to cycle around 650 km 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.

By some estimates we have around one charity for every 160 people, compared to, say, England’s one per 322.

And there are lots of good reasons; Kiwis are doers, government help can only go so far. So let’s hear it for the charity donors and the charity workers. The people who keep the wheels of giving going.

- Sharron Pardoe, News Director Communities