Vicki Buck
Encyclopedia
Political life
Elected to the Christchurch City CouncilChristchurch City Council
The Christchurch City Council is the local government authority for Christchurch in New Zealand. It is a territorial authority elected to represent the people of Christchurch. Since 2007, the Mayor of Christchurch is Bob Parker, who stood as an independent candidate...
in 1975 at the age of 19, she became the city's first woman mayor fourteen years later.
She began her political career as a member of the Labour Party, but stood for mayor as an independent. An active and vigorous leader, she is widely credited with leading a turnaround in the perception of Christchurch as a city. Before becoming mayor she also was one of five Local Government Commissioners working from 1984 to 1989 on a major reorganisation of local government in New Zealand.
Her sister Sally Buck is an elected councillor for Christchurch City Council.
Life after politics
More recently she has:- been a member of the New Zealand government's Science and Innovation Advisory Council
- been chair of the NZ Learning Discovery Trust, which in turn has set up Discovery 1Discovery 1 SchoolDiscovery 1 School is located in the central city of Christchurch, New Zealand. The school is state funded and offers individual, discovery based learning programmes...
and UnlimitedUnlimited paenga tawhitiUnlimited Paenga Tawhiti is a state secondary school located in the city centre of Christchurch, New Zealand.It was established in 2003 by the Christchurch-based Learning Discovery Trust which had earlier set up the primary Discovery 1 School, and is one of just eleven schools running under the...
state schools in central Christchurch. The schools are based on the student being central in their own individual learning - Initiated the LIFT Trust with five schools in Linwood to create free tertiary education for studentswho may otherwise not enjoy this because of the fees barrier.
She is now one of the directors and co-founders of Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation, a bio-fuel company using wild algae, and cleaning dirty and contaminated water.
She is also a director and co-founder of Celsias.com, a website for business and community groups which is based on the premise that Governments are not acting quickly enough on climate change and it will be up to all of us to act.
Buck is a director and co-founder of Carbonscape, aimed at sequestering carbon from waste biomass through microwave technology. She is on the NZ advisory board of Craigmore Sustainables, involved in carbon forestry.
She is involved in a number of other cleantech initiatives
In 2008 she was nominated by a panel commissioned by The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
newspaper as one of 50 people who could reverse the effects of climate change
Climate change
Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions or the distribution of events around that average...
.