Dairy New Zealand, the Palmerston North City Council, Recorded Music New Zealand and Rural Women New Zealand are the finalists in Massey University’s 2019 Domestic Partnership Excellence Awards.
The annual awards celebrate the close connections the University has with its external partners – nationally and internationally – and recognises businesses and organisations that have actively collaborated with the University in areas including research, knowledge exchange, teaching and learning, reaching new audiences and internationalisation.
The awards also recognise international collaborations. This year’s finalists in the International Partnership Excellence Awards are the International Development Programme, Sri Lanka’s University of Peradeniya and the Unram-Massey Agribusiness Innovation Centre, a joint venture with Indonesia’s Mataram University.
The awards will be held on March 20 at Massey's annual Defining Excellence Awards dinner, in Auckland. The dinner also provides an opportunity for the University to commend its leading teachers and researchers and outstanding alumni.
Finalists
Recorded Music New Zealand
Recorded Music New Zealand and Massey’s College of Creative Arts have been working in partnership for four years, jointly promoting the Bachelor of Commercial Music degree and the Vodafone New Zealand Music Awards’ best producer category.
The collaboration has extended to partnering industry panel discussions, including the New Zealand Music Producers Series; Design Studio, a free seminar with local designers; and Film-Makers Studio, a free seminar with local film-makers. Recorded Music also contributed to a “speed dating” music industry session for final-year students and continue to contribute to staff research around the area of music rights and distribution. Recorded Music is a vital connector and hub for Massey students launching their music careers.
In 2018 Massey University and Recorded Music partnered to bring the Vodafone New Zealand Artisan Awards to Wellington, which took place at the Wellington campus in the College of Creative Arts’ new music facilities. The event was covered by television and print media and was streamed live from the studios in Wellington.
Palmerston North City Council
Massey University and the Palmerston North City Council enjoy a longstanding and broad partnership. The council has been an integral partner in the delivery of the Resource and Environmental Planning programme for many decades. Its involvement includes helping students with field trips and designing and carrying out final-year projects, providing guest lecturers, funding and stakeholder governance.
The Council also supports the Fitzherbert Science Centre in which Massey is a central partner, facilitating the development of Food HQ as New Zealand’s premier food research centre.
Several Massey Living Labs research projects have been developed in collaboration with the Council. These include the Living Labs Active Transport research, where council support has led to co-designed projects on barriers to active transport in Palmerston North. Since 2017 Massey has been a research partner with the Council in the MBIE-funded Welcoming Communities initiative, Te Waharoa ki ngā Hapori.
Rural Women New Zealand
The partnership between Rural Women New Zealand and Massey University has helped to dramatically reduce the incidence of the disease leptospirosis and to improve the health of rural communities throughout New Zealand. In the year to March 2017, the risk incidence was 2.4 cases per 100,000. This compares with an annual incidence risk in the early 1970s of 25 cases per 100,000.
The Women’s Division of Federated Farmers (as Rural Women was previously known) raised considerable funds to enable research to start at Massey University. The research that followed and awareness campaigns were instrumental in reducing the numbers of people who had leptospirosis each year.
Today the collaboration continues, and Rural Women New Zealand funds Massey PhD research into meat workers, livestock and diagnostics. The Farmers Leptospirosis Action Group, led by Rural Women, has secured funding from the Government’s Sustainable Farming Fund, the Agricultural and Marketing Research and Development Trust and others.
Dairy New Zealand
The longstanding partnership between DairyNZ and Massey University, its key science partner, has seen the organisation work on multiple projects, including reducing nitrates leaching into waterways.
Last year, DairyNZ funded scholarships for 26 undergraduate students, paid their fees and provided mentors. The students are taught to be kaitiaki (guardians) of the land, to minimise environmental impacts and be productive and profitable.
A joint liaison committee ensures DairyNZ and Massey work together for the best outcomes for the industry and its future. It is an effective partnership model that benefits current and future generations.
IDP Education
Through PaCE’s relationship with IDP Education, Massey has been able to deliver the International English Language Testing System exams for more than 20 years. Due to the strength of this relationship, Massey is the only institution with more than one testing centre in New Zealand. When the programme’s innovative new computer-delivered test was implemented last year the relationship led to Massey being the first institution in New Zealand to deliver this version of the test.
IDP Education actively promotes its testing partners in NZ and overseas, and our long-term relationship has generated millions of dollars of revenue ($1.9m in 2018 alone), and attracted thousands of international individuals to our University.
IDP Education produces a significant amount of financial revenue (approx. $1.4m in 2018) to the University along with quality students who have contributed to Massey’s own research and projects.
Unram-Massey Agribusiness Innovation Centre
The Unram-Massey University Agribusiness Innovation Centre is the centrepiece of a longstanding partnership between Massey University and the University of Mataram in Lombok, East Indonesia. It has had a positive impact on hundreds of families in this economically deprived region.
Introducing best practice across the entire value chain, from the farmers or producers to the consumer. Through its work, the Unram-Massey University Agribusiness Innovation Centre has increased the productivity of farmers across Lombok and Sumbawa Islands, along with their connectivity to markets.
A key initiative has been to develop the capability of local farmers to serve Lombok’s growing tourist market with high-quality fruit and vegetables. This allowed many local residents to maintain incomes through the devastating earthquakes of 2018.
University of Peradeniya
Massey University’s School of Veterinary Science was successful in an application to the MFAT International Development Group’s Partnerships Fund to deliver a world-leading transformational veterinary education twinning project with the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Science (FVMAS) at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.
The NZ$2.2 million project was the first independently funded World Organisation for Animal Health Veterinary Twinning project anywhere. It consisted of a world-leading and complex curricular and pedagogy change project where the UP’s FVMAS have willingly embraced substantial change to not just their veterinary undergraduate curriculum, but also how it is taught and how they interact with industry stakeholders.
The new five-year veterinary undergraduate curriculum was approved by the Sri Lankan University Grants Commissionin late 2018, thus significantly advancing the ambitious aspirations of both the Commission and the University of Peradeniya to become a South Asian regional centre of veterinary education excellence and preparing them to apply for international accreditation recognition.
The partnership has also created a highly productive working relationship between the academic partners with the result that COS PhD enrolments from Sri Lanka have grown exponentially from 0 in 2016 to 31 in 2018. Unusually, this PhD growth has been the primary driver behind the 88% overall recruitment growth from Sri Lanka since 2014.