Mark Chapman: Community Board member and tourism marketing manager

July 15th, 2011
By David Armstrong

Taking on the job of running Motueka iSite in 2005 was an eye-opener for Mark Chapman. Seeing the vital role the information centre plays in building a strong community led to his decision to offer his services for a range of influential community groups.

His community work, alongside his role as marketing manager for Abel Tasman Sea Shuttle, in turn led to his election to the Motueka Community Board last year.

At 44 years of age, this effervescent man is the youngest member of the Board, and many hope he can inject some new energy and ideas to local leadership.

This would hardly have been an outcome expected by his school teachers at Motueka South and Motueka High schools, where Mark says socialising and "fooling around" (including a dollop of mischief - "but you don't want to know about that", he laughs) was top of his agenda. He had the ability to be in the top half academically, but admits he lacked the application.

Bored with schoolwork, he left the High School half way through his sixth year when offered his first of many jobs by Fred Congdon at Motueka Furnishers.

Mark is a seventh generation New Zealander Chapman, part of a family which has been based up the Motueka Valley on the west bank farming a variety of crops including tobacco and still grazing sheep and cows on ever-shrinking land. But all his jobs were in offices and retail outlets.

He entered his first marriage and had one child, but it didn't work out. From then on, work in other parts of the South Island - largely in Dunedin and Oamaru - led to quite a lot of time away from Motueka, until the desire for better weather brought him back home about six years ago.

Mark met his second wife in Nelson and they had two children, now aged 6 and 11. Last year, however, that 13-year relationship ended and Mark is now rebuilding his life around shared parenting of Reuben and Bronte. "It's all part of the challenge, isn't it," he says.

His working life has been marked by taking up stimulating challenges and working at them until he was bored and moved on. Twelve years of it was with AMI Insurance in various cities, but back in Motueka he did some insurance broking and then was local branch supervisor of Nelson Building Society for two years.

"Then a role came up at the Motueka iSite, and that was one of my most rewarding jobs ever, for so many different reasons" he says. "Everyone should do something for their community once in their life, because it's so rewarding.

"In fact, it almost becomes an obsession because once I got in there and got the operation running well I involved myself more and more in the community. I was on the museum committee, Our Town Motueka, the Tasman Bays Promotion Association. The Community Board came along. It's great."

Since his marriage fell over, he's had to back out of some of these so he could ensure he was able to give 100 per cent to those he stayed with. But he was proud of his managership of iSite, where he and his team were able to trim costs and refocus it from being just an information service into being run like a business.

He says this sudden awakening of community awareness was triggered by seeing how pivotal iSite is to the Motueka community for so many reasons. "We were helping visitors in distress, letting people overseas know about [our district]. In the end, it gave me a huge insight into the community and how rewarding it is to work for the community, come up with ideas and so on."

Mark says at the time he initiated efforts to get some "cross pollination" between iSite and Our Town Motueka, and they went close to amalgamating the two organisations, which had similar aims and could share resources.

Mark has developed a strong position on the future of Motueka. He believes one of its biggest problems has been the lack of a single place people could go to for local information and services, and he has been advocating a new facility - ideally in Decks Reserve - housing the new library, iSite, Council offices, Department of Conservation and other core information services in one easy-to-find location.

"And this Motueka West Strategy is the first time in, what, 160 years that Motueka has thought, 'hey, maybe we should plan something'," he says. "You look at the town and you have to see that nothing's ever been planned. Right down to our shopping centre, which is on a state highway."

He acknowledges that the Abel Tasman National Park didn't really exist until recent times, but with the increase in tourism to the area Motueka needs more strategic planning and thinking ahead rather than just living in the seventies or eighties and wanting no real change.

"The Motueka Community Board should be starting to think strategically for the town of Motueka, and showing real leadership on things like cleaning up the town of litter", which he had advocated at this month's Board meeting with the suggestion of a big clean-up campaign.

He pauses to get the right words. "I had no idea how many people were inwardly focused in this town. There's lots of talking and passing resolutions but not so much getting out and doing stuff." But Mark acknowledges that he himself struggles with the bit in between coming up with ideas (such as a big town clean-up) and achieving an end result.

"One of my failings is that I come with an idea, I get it so far, but the mechanics of ideas don't interest me. The bit in the middle is my failing, the bit I know I struggle with. That's where you've got to have good strong people in the middle who can point in the right direction, and that's a position that [the Community Board] should start leading from. Perhaps in conjunction with Our Town Motueka and Tasman Bays Promotion Association. We're the three key organisations in town and we should be working a lot closer."

He believes, for example, that such a facility, if planned for the future with good access and parking, would relieve traffic congestion problems in High Street. Mark is a trenchant opponent of any bypass away from the retail strip, saying it would kill off vital tourist trade. "But don't get me started on the bypass," he says with a playful laugh.

After leaving iSite, Mark was sales manager for Ngai Tahu Tourism based at Marahau for two years. For the past year and a half, Mark has been playing a time-consuming role as marketing manager of Abel Tasman Sea Shuttle, which he says is the second largest operator in the Abel Tasman park. He pays credit to the opponents, Wilsons Abel Tasman, whose "powerhouse marketing" has helped to "drag the park from some dreary backwater to possibly one of the busiest parks in the country".

His work is mainly promotional (such as the new Crusader boat) and raising the firm's largely subdued profile. Part of this focuses on sponsorships and "community goods", such as supporting the Birdsong Trust and other environmental groups restoring the park to a more pristine state.

Away from work and community activities, he likes to relax with his family and wants to do more walking and tramping, particularly in his beloved Kahurangi National Park.

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