The Our Amazing Place Community Treasure Hunt that was to be held around Riccarton on March 3 has been cancelled.

Our Amazing Place Community Treasure Hunts are free community events that seek to connect people to their local communities. While racing around the community in a fun treasure hunt, teams discover people, places, businesses and services that are present in a neighbourhood.

The treasure hunt trail features a number of stations which each have a challenge, activity or task that must be completed by teams to gain a stamp for their "passport". These stations are hosted by local organisations at their own venue and give organisations a chance to showcase some of what they provide as a kind of open day.

Amazing Place Treasure Hunts were dreamed up some years ago by the organisation Violence Free Communities (www.violencefreecommunities.org). The first was run in Massey, Auckland, but the idea has now spread to other centres.

Sadly, local organiser Matt Meek said the decision had to be made to cancel this year's Riccarton event.

"Over the past two weeks we had been working hard to bring organisationson board to participate. We had had a lot of expressions of interest in being involved, but as the implications of what this actually meant were felt, a number of organisations pulled out, to a point where we no longer felt it was feasible to go ahead.

"As you can imagine I'm gutted about this. My team and I had put a lot of effort into making this work and we really did think we were on track until the beginning of this week. We were planning to partner with another event called Connect, which will still run at Harrington Park on the same day, 3-6pm. We will get behind event event and encourage the organisations we were working with to do the same.

"We hope to give the amazing place another go in the future."