On 4 September 2020, the Mayoral Forum farewelled Dr David Bromell from the regional forums secretariat.
The Mayoral Forum is supported by a permanent secretariat hosted by Environment Canterbury. David helped establish the Canterbury Policy Forum in 2013. In late 2014, he started working with the Mayoral Forum to develop the Canterbury Regional Economic Development Strategy (CREDS) (PDF file, 2 MB). The following year, he began providing secretariat support to the Mayoral Forum and Chief Executives Forum. In 2017, the Chief Executives Forum also established an Operations Forum and a Corporate Forum. During his time on the secretariat, David has supported the Mayoral Forum with the development and implementation of two iterations of the CREDS, an overview of wellbeing in Canterbury (PDF file, 2.4 MB) and the development of the Mayoral Forum’s Plan for Canterbury 2020–22.
David ‘retired’ from Environment Canterbury on 18 September to take up a six-month research fellowship at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum NRW Germany. His research project is on the Christchurch Call and related issues, including freedom of expression, internet censorship/filtering, social media regulation, hate speech and cancel culture. He continues to be a Senior Associate of the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies at Victoria University of Wellington and an Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Canterbury.
On 4 September, members of the Mayoral Forum and their chief executives took time to acknowledge and thank David for his contribution to the work of regional forums. A whakataukī was shared: ‘He mahi kai takata, he mahi kai hōaka,’ which compares the work of sandstone fashioning pounamu to the patience and energy required to achieve important outcomes. The Forum presented David with a taonga of inanga pounamu, ‘Waitaha’.
Current members of the regional forums secretariat are Maree McNeilly (Principal Advisor) and Rosa Wakefield (Project Co-ordinator), with a senior advisor soon to be appointed.
Photo: Jim Palmer (chair, Chief Executives Forum), Sam Broughton (chair, Mayoral Forum), David Bromell.
