Volunteer Of The Year 2024 Erin Stewart

Erin has worked on multiple IT projects for the Club as a volunteer. She did the design template for the upgrade of the www.alpineclub.org.nz website and spent many hours liaising with both staff and contractors on both appearance and functionality of the site. 
Since then, Erin volunteered onto the project team (just three people) for the ClimbNZ upgrade, where she has been involved for two years contributing design and functionality input at a high level. This has involved meetings most weeks with the project team and developer, even after the initial intensive design work.
Her expertise in the website development area has been invaluable. Modernising the club website and ClimbNZ has been a big step up for the Club as online presence becomes increasingly important and both sites were dated-looking and reflected poorly on the Club as a brand.

It cannot be overstated how key Erin's input has been on quality outcomes for these IT projects.

Erin has also served on the Publications Committee for several years as a volunteer and helped rescue issues with both the NiBS and Banff websites in a timely manner. She contributed her design skills to the new-look NZAJ when it was merged with The Climber.

Erin is currently a Board member for ACAT and while this is not directly an NZAC position, it reflects her ongoing voluntary contribution to the NZ climbing community. She has brought some of the access functionality useful for both ACAT and NZAC into the ClimbNZ work and this will benefit the community and may not have been possible otherwise. She has also, alongside her partner Derek, maintained the Castle Hill Basin website as a free to use resource for all climbers who frequent this climbing area. The site is wildly popular and an essential resource for the area, to the point where its use has spawned its own verbs in the local climbing community 'Basining' or to 'Basin'.

We are honoured to award the Volunteer of the Year 2024 to Erin Stewart.