Introducing our new trustees

There are many ways to volunteer and get involved in A Rocha. Recently we welcomed two great new people to our board of trustees – Mary Hutchinson from Wellington and Stephen Pattemore from Auckland.

Photo credit: Nicola Edmonds / North & South

Mary is a retired GP who has had a lifelong interest in environmental issues. This was originally inspired by childhood family holidays near a North Canterbury river. She is involved with the Papawai Reserve Group in her local suburb of Pukeahu-Mt Cook, working to restore the small un-piped ‘Papawai Stream’, with riparian planting, water quality monitoring and advocacy. Mary’s medical career included working in mental health; with newly arrived refugees in Wellington, and later, student health. Currently she is a volunteer lay ecumenical Chaplain two days a week at Massey University, Wellington. Since retirement, Mary has been developing her interest in street and social documentary photography; including several exhibitions and self-published photo-books focusing on distinctive parts of local urban areas. Mary is married to Jonathan and they have two adult daughters.

You can view some of Mary’s photography in this profile of her in North & South magazine a few years ago.

Steve at Brookesdale, A Rocha Canada

Stephen is the Translations Director for Bible Society New Zealand.  He serves translation projects in New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Thailand. He is also Executive Editor of The Bible Translator, UBS’s flagship academic journal, published by SAGE. Stephen’s research interests include the book of Revelation, Relevance Theory, translation theory and biblical hermeneutics, especially ecological hermeneutics. Stephen has presented papers on the biblical interpretation and the care of the earth at many A Rocha conferences including the very first “Creation Care” conference in Auckland in 2005. He has been a member of the ARANZ Auckland committee since its beginnings in 2008 and is involved with a local stream restoration project in Unsworth Heights.  Stephen is an elder at Northcross Community Church.  He is married to Raewyn (co-chair of Auckland ARANZ committee) and they have four adult children and six grandchildren.

Apart from serving on the board, we are also looking for volunteers who are interested in helping us with developing and implementing our communications strategy including social media / marketing / fundraising / photography / article writing / campaigns etc.

If you have an interest in any of these and would like to support A Rocha in these areas, then please send us an email, we’d love to hear from you!