Highly-skilled migrant advocate recognised

Five Nelson Tasman locals have been awarded 2025 New Years Honours. Throughout Tuesday, Nelson App shares each of their stories.

Priyani de Silva-Currie has adroitly supported migrants pursuing engineering and asset management careers in Aotearoa for the better part of three decades.

The current strategic asset management technical fellow at Trafalgar St multidisciplinary consultancy Beca, has been made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2025 New Year Honours for services to multicultural communities, civil engineering and netball.

Priyani, who migrated with her family from Sri Lanka in 1974 when she was three, says she thought she was in trouble when she got the email but was quickly “blown away” upon realising what it was actually for.

“You just never expect that these things are going to happen to you… we came here to New Zealand 50 years ago and if you'd said to us then that 50 years later I'd be receiving a King's honour, my family wouldn't have known how to take that,” she says.

After her Greymouth upbringing, Priyani studied commerce and competed in netball in Wellington and Nelson before taking up an asset management position at Nelson City Council in 1996, a field she has been enamoured with since.

She is patron of an annual $5000 scholarship, which is named in her honour, for emerging asset management professionals who come from under-represented and minority backgrounds.

Priyani is also a life member and previous president of Āpōpō Infrastructure Asset Management Professionals in which she spearheaded a strategic transformation of the organisation and was the brainchild of uniquely New Zealand Indigenous-based asset management guidance for practitioners, which launched in October 2023.

“I felt that there was a missing gap in terms of our application of asset management across our communities that incorporated Indigenous practice,” she says.

“That was a huge driver for me to create guidance for New Zealand practitioners on Indigenous asset management… it's New Zealand's industry bible now.”

Priyani’s laurels also include holding president of the New Zealand Federation of Multicultural Councils in 2014, and its respective Nelson and Manawatū branches between 2009 and 2017.

As the national president, she procured and implemented diverse multicultural programmes and supported existing programmes, including settlement support, Engineering New Zealand’s Migrant Forum and Multicultural New Zealand’s Professional Speaking for Migrants course.

“[These Forums are] a big part of my life… I wanted to make that integration pathway a little bit easier for people so that they didn't have to go through what we went through, which was straight into the baptism of fire,” she says.

“For people from other countries to come to New Zealand as engineers and other professionals, they're doing it for a better lifestyle and culture.

“It's much harder to work in those professions in other countries, especially in lower socio-economic or third world countries. So if I can help bridge that gap, I will.”

Priyani also formerly chaired New Zealand Carbon and Energy Professionals between 2009 and 2014, becoming a life member in 2016.

She is the current vice president of the International Federation of Municipal Engineers, and President-elect for the 2027-2030 term.

While she didn’t make it as a Silver Fern, her love for netball hasn’t wavered through three decades calling the shots with school, club, regional, NPC and Beko League teams, coaching in both in Nelson and Manawatū, where she was based for 10 years.

Between 1998 and 2013, she was on the executive and chaired the Nelson Netball Association and was a founding committee member and fundraising manager of Saxton Field Sports Stadium Society from 2004 to 2013.

Priyani received a Service Award from Nelson Netball in 2016 and has also run Netball New Zealand introductory coaching clinics.

“I picked up a netball at age five, and the rest is history… I am very proud when I see players [I’ve coached] who are now playing in the ANZ Premiership or within the New Zealand team” she says.

“It's really awesome to see the players from what is effectively a small regional town excel… and I’ll be coaching a premier side and hopefully involved in a rep team in 2025.”

Priyani says her professional work and advocacy is also showing no signs of weakness for the years ahead and she is grateful and humbled to those who’d supported her and believed she was “worthy enough” for a royal honour.