Honoured for serving her community
A woman who worked as the Cambridge Coroner for 11 years is among those named in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for 2018.
Jocelyn Cooney had supported a range of community organisations in Cambridge using her professional legal expertise in trustee and honorary solicitor voluntary roles.
She received the Queen’s Service Medal for services to the community.
At one end of the spectrum, Cooney was on the board of trustees for Salisbury School in Nelson, a state school for intellectually disabled girls which for eight years had been fighting to stay open.
At the other end, she’s a trustee of the Cambridge Autumn Festival, which for over 10 years has been bringing arts to the town every April.
‘‘The festival is definitely the fun end and the school is the serious end of things. I have a relative who is intellectually disabled and I was shoulder-tapped to help out at Salisbury. It’s the most time consuming group I’m involved with but worthwhile.
‘‘I’m not sure how I got involved in the autumn festival, but I loved it, it was great fun to see what happened to the town over the course of the 10-day event.’’
The third community group she was most active in was the Cambridge Safer Community Trust.
‘‘That’s the umbrella trust that administers the Neighbourhood Support network and we’re involved in the community patrol, those are good trusts to be involved with.’’
Cooney was also the Cambridge Coroner from 1996 to 2007.
‘‘The hearings were held in the boardroom of the [Cambridge] police station and that was really good because instead of being in a district court, where you are above people, we were sitting around a table together.
‘‘I think people got a lot out of that, they got closure. I was one of about 70 part-time coroners in New Zealand and that got taken down to 23 fulltime coroners.
‘‘I had a business to run so I couldn’t apply [to be fulltime], it was sad that they changed the system.
‘‘Some of the things you saw and heard, particularly when there were children involved, that was very sad but you dealt with that.’’
Cooney was a trustee of the Waipa Community Trust for nine years.
She was part of the group that initiated the formation of the Cambridge Health and Community Trust and remained on that trust for five years.
She holds or has held the position of honorary solicitor for various Cambridge organisations including Parents Centre, Grey Power, Cambridge Creative Fibre, Cambridge Society of Arts, Rotary, Cambridge Community House and Riding for the Disabled.
She is a patron of Cambridge Lyceum.
She has been a member of the New Zealand Law Society Cost Revision Committee for the past 20 years.
Cooney was a foundation trustee for three years at Hautapu School in Cambridge.
She said she was not sure who put her name forward for the Queen’s Birthday Honour but wanted to thank the community groups she had been involved with, her family and particularly the staff at her firm, Cooney Law.