Wai Connection: the full project report
Whakamana te maunga,
whakamana te wai,
he mauri o ngā tangata,
ngā mea katoa he pai
If we look after the water
from the mountains to the sea,
it will look after us.
That whakataukī has guided Mountains to Sea Conservation Trust for over 20 years, and it sat at the heart of Wai Connection - Tātai ki te Wai, our national freshwater capability programme delivered with the Ministry for the Environment's Essential Freshwater Fund from 2023 to 2026.
While we don’t often blow our own trumpet, it’s fair to say we (and our partners!) smashed it. Just look at the numbers:
🌊 400+ catchment groups supported across 13 regions, exceeding our target by 300% - more than 36% of the country’s landmass
🤝 Fostered 122,772 community engagements at events and training sessions
💧46,874 volunteer hours contributed - over $1.35m of in-kind investment in freshwater health
🐟 52 Focus catchment maps backed by science support from national technical partner EOS Ecology
Wai Connection worked because it paired national consistency with genuinely local delivery.
Thank you to our regional provider organisations who made that happen across the country: Tairāwhiti Environment Centre and He Awa Ora He Tai Ora Trust, Sustainable Hawke's Bay, the Whanganui Region Catchment Collective, Puketoi to the Pacific Catchment Collective, Tasman Bay Guardians, Te Tau Ihu Environmental Trust, Otago Catchment Communities, Thriving Southland, Wild for Taranaki, Go Eco with Piako Waihou Catchment Trust, KCollab and the Pokaiwhenua Catchment Group, and Mountains to Sea Wellington.
Thank you to our Board of Trustees for their belief in a project this ambitious to deliver and this hard to measure, and to the Ministry for the Environment, who trusted us with a project of this scale and complexity. And most of all, thank you to the catchment communities and volunteers who did the real mahi - turning up to plant, monitor, wānanga and advocate for their awa, whenever and however they could.
Government funding for Wai Connection has now come to an end. We're proud of what it achieved, honest about what's been lost for groups who needed more time, and excited for what comes next: Wai Collective, Mountains to Sea's national programme for community-based freshwater monitoring.
You can read more in our final project report as well as our 'Changing Waters' report, which shares what we learnt from a series of end-of-project workshops held across the country in collaboration with Miranda Cassidy-O'Connell from the Centre for Social Impact. The Wai Collective summary below outlines what's next for us.
