Grace Under Fire

The Student Volunteer Army is teaming up with US student leaders who emerged in the wake of the Parkland school shooting.

- Clare De Lore

In what seems like a moment, lives can change forever. The February 2011 Christchurch earthquake lasted barely 10 seconds, but it left 185 dead, hundreds injured and widespread damage that the city is still dealing with. At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, 14 students and three staff members died in a seven-minute shooting spree on Valentine’s Day.

Students in both places started grassroots movements in response to the crisis they endured and survived, and next month, 28 survivors of the Parkland shooting will come to New Zealand to talk with their Kiwi counterparts about how to sustain student-led movements.

It’s been more than seven years since Sam Johnson, then 21, called on his fellow students at the University of Canterbury to bring shovels and help dig out the liquefaction silt engulfing thousands of Christchurch homes after the first big quake in September 2010. The response was overwhelming; the Student Volunteer Army (SVA) was born.

Now a ready-response community-action group based at the university, the UC SVA has 3000 members and is the largest club on campus.

The SVA and the visiting Parkland group will team up at the July seminar in Christchurch to share their experiences, and their knowledge about how to sustain organisations after the news cameras have moved on and the public attention has waned. More than two dozen of the Parkland survivors will spend five days here, most of that time in Christchurch, but also visiting Government House in Wellington to meet the Governor-General.

Delaney Tarr, who will be among the visitors, addressed one of the many March for Our Lives rallies that were organised in the aftermath of the shooting, and was already anticipating that anger could subside and energies dissipate.