Supporting island communities and cultures

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on 15 January 2022, the resulting ash cloud and tsunami had a devastating impact on the island nation of Tonga. The United Nations has estimated that more than 80 per cent of the Kingdom’s population has been affected, and not just with homes destroyed – the fallout from the eruption has killed livestock, buried agricultural land, destroyed fishing boats and poisoned the seas, creating lasting problems that go far beyond the immediate need for food, water and shelter.

Enter the Pasifika Collective, an organisation founded just before the COVID pandemic by Mark Donaldson whose yacht agency and yacht support company Marinelogix is a key touchpoint for superyachts visiting New Zealand and the surrounding area. “This was Mark’s brainchild,” begins Isla McKechnie, a marine PR professional who also serves as Pasifika’s General Manager. “We really love this part of the world, and Pasifika is a way that we can both further involve ourselves with communities in the Pacific, and also help superyachts that are coming through this part of the world get a better understanding of those communities.”

The eruption in Tonga has thrust the nascent Collective, which draws support from the New Zealand marine industry and beyond, firmly into the spotlight as Mark and his team – along with the superyachts Como and Sea Eagle II, who had been caught in New Zealand’s strict lockdown measures – pulled together to coordinate disaster relief efforts for the stricken island nation.

“The Tonga situation really brought us to the forefront, and in the last couple of weeks we have applied for charity status,” says Donaldson. “Over the years we’ve watched – and worked with – YachtAid Global (YAG), and I talked with (YAG’s Director) Zoran Selakovic and said, ‘we need to stick our hands up here in the region’. And we ran with it for Tonga and it’s been very successful.”

Indeed, through their various efforts Pasifika quickly coordinated the response from the New Zealand superyacht industry and, with the help of the crews of Como and Sea Eagle II, collected aid and donations and arranged its shipment to Tonga. Moreover, the team is now collating second-phase relief, which is more targeted toward the long-term needs of the communities – seeds for fruit and vegetables to help replace destroyed crops, for example.

Key to the Pasifika Collective’s efforts is an innate understanding of those local community needs, which is driven by three separate elements. First is Donaldson’s own Samoan, Cook Island and New Zealand background; second are local ‘ambassadors’ in each of the Pacific island communities, with whom the Pasifika Collective’s team meet via video conference at least once a month to identify specific community needs or projects; and third, for Tonga, has been McKechnie’s contact with the Honourable Jenny Salesa, a New Zealand Member of Parliament who is of Tongan heritage.

“Our ambassadors act as a window for us into what’s happening in each island nation, social commentary, what’s happening with COVID, the political climate, and little projects that we could assist with,” Donaldson explains. “But we can also filter that information out to the wider superyachting fraternity, and it provides relevant information on our region as opposed to the usual tourist sort of weasel words, if you will.”

Current projects in Tonga, following on from the initial disaster relief, also include providing back-to-school packs for 40 schoolchildren. “They were relocated after the eruption,” says Donaldson, “and they’ve got nothing – and they start school next week (in mid-March). So Isla and Alison (Walker, who serves as crew liaison) went shopping for backpacks, exercise books, all the things they might need, boxed them up and sent them directly to the Queen of Tonga, and she gifted them to those children.”

The Collective is now working on a couple of other initiatives – one is with the Cook Islands Voyaging Society, which serves to educate local children in seafaring, for which Donaldson says there is the opportunity to create pathways into superyachting as a career; another is working with produce suppliers to take fruit and vegetables that don’t meet supermarket cosmetic standards – so-called wonky veg – and obtaining funding to purchase the B-grade stock for delivery to food banks which help those minority communities.

Further, adds Donaldson, the Collective is big on telling the story as well. “In Polynesian culture information is transferred via verbal communication, and we’ll try to tell the story from start to finish so that people can see the smiles on the faces of the children or the young ladies at those schools,” he enthuses. “That’s what we want to project, not a corporate face. The vision of the Pasifika Collective,” he concludes, “was to create an inclusive platform that not only the New Zealand superyacht marine industry but that of Oceania as a whole could buy into. It has been well received and it’s growing, and we have a number of companies that we work with already here in New Zealand.”

With its target area spanning the whole of the Pacific, from the Cook Islands, Samoa and Vanuatu to Hawaii , Tahiti, the Galapagos and beyond, the Pasifika Collective has grand ambitions, but with the weight of New Zealand’s marine industry growing behind it, and the willingness of superyachts and their crews to act at the forefront of it, it’s not hard to feel this is a positive impact movement that will only serve to highlight the good that superyachting can do, and the good that it can bring to those remote communities. The relief effort in the wake of the Tongan disaster is a prime example – and it is only the beginning.