Search Results for: Arotahi ā-Hapori | Community Focus

Sistema Whangarei – Toi Akorangi goal is to impact the lives of children in the Whangarei community.  Through orchestral music they deliver the El-Sistema inspired programme for young people.

The ARK Collective is a shining example of a community that has banded together to support and empower one another. This not-for-profit group of passionate locals is based in the Wēteri (Wesley) School and dedicated to helping vulnerable whānau in the Wēteri, Puketāpapa area.

In our March community feature we showcase Papakura Marae and all their amazing mahi for their community during recent weather events.

During the January floods, the NZ Ethnic Women’s Trust lost their space and vital essentials that help serve their community.

If you would like to help spread the word to those who may be able to assist the NZ Ethnic Women’s Trust in finding a new location or providing resources, you can connect with them through their website or social media.

Every Saturday from 3-4pm, The Blackhouse broadcasts on Wellington Access Radio.  This radio talk show and podcast centres the African heritage and Black Diaspora experience in Aotearoa.  The Blackhouse’s creator, the Tanzanian-Aotearoan Liya Lupala, is committed to providing a space for this diverse community to share stories, social observations, music, history, news, politics and events. Wellington-born Liya says “I grew up in an era when there weren’t many African people around.  We were kind of invisible in the New Zealand landscape.”  Inspired by other podcasts and YouTube channels which feature African heritage and Black Diaspora experiences, Liya realised that New Zealand needed something similar to capture the lives and views of this often overlooked community.  “You see stereotypes or tropes about who we are, or academic and talking heads discussing us and imposing their perceptions upon us, but the views of everyday members of our community weren’t being captured anywhere. “When I started The Blackhouse, we were doing a fairly structured interview style of content, but we’ve since evolved more into just conversations.  The content doesn’t need to be cultural, it just needs to represent topics and interests which are important to us.  Recently, I had someone ask me at an event if we could cover the unique experiences of dating as a black person in Aotearoa and I thought, absolutely, that’s something The Blackhouse needs to explore.” Liya has, thus far, been the driving force behind The Blackhouse – both creatively and financially – but she has big growth aspirations which she knows will require additional funding and expertise.  She recently connected with Hui E! Community Aotearoa through another podcaster at Voices of Aroha and started to put some of those plans in motion.  “I don’t know anything about funding, so I knew I needed help with some grant writing assistance.  Hui E! connected me with a volunteer grant writer who walked me through all the applications, bit by bit.” Hui E! helped Liya get her first funding application to Wellington Community Fund over the line, as well as connecting her with Gift Collective, who can receive financial contributions on her behalf.  “I didn’t want to incorporate because my passion really is on the creative side of the process.  That connection with Gift Collective makes it possible for me to do the parts I love, and saves me a lot of paperwork.” While she awaits the results of that first funding application, Liya is busy looking ahead to the future of The Blackhouse.  “I really want to be getting more into the outreach space; connecting young people in our community with media, perhaps as part of their existing studies.  The black community of New Zealand is not just migrants and refugees.  We have a whole generation of New Zealand-born people of African descent who don’t necessarily know where they fit in here.  My hope is that we can provide an inclusive space for all of these communities which may be very unique, but which all have something very important in common.  The Blackhouse is our virtual marae, because we don’t have that tangible space established in Aotearoa just yet.  […]

Borne of the increased challenges and pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, Applause Charitable Trust is supporting the staff of Aotearoa’s Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to continue caring for vulnerable New Zealanders during these unprecedented times.  Applause creator, Jen Deben, says she was inspired to help when she saw how frontline support workers answered the call for New Zealand in 2020. “I became aware of the massive hours that NGO staff were working during Level 4 Lockdown to support the Government to quickly house, feed and care for vulnerable whānau.  COVID-19 increased caseloads for frontline community workers to the point where they were working 7-day weeks, up to 12 hours a day, and those increased needs are still continuing on long after the easing of lockdown restrictions.  The evidence is overwhelming that our NGOs need support and are absorbing a huge amount of unmet need.” The idea for Applause, Jen says, is to provide a practical response which connects kaimahi and community workers with free or discounted goods and services provided by local businesses and volunteers.  During her initial research, she learned about Hui E! Community Aotearoa and the support that she could access as part of the Hui E! network.  “There’s so much work involved in establishing a charity, and certainly an element of not knowing what you don’t know.  For us, it was about bridging that knowledge gap as quickly as we could.  The work we’re doing is very much now, not in some future state.  Hui E! was hugely supportive about that.” Hui E! has provided Applause with a range of support, Jen says, from grant writing and learning opportunities, to critical connections and updates from the Hui E! network.  “It was extremely valuable for us to learn how labour-intensive the grant writing process can be, and to use that process with Hui E!’s volunteer grant writer to really nail down some of our key messaging and streamline future grant proposals.  We weren’t successful in that first application, but we learned so much about who we are and the level of information we need to be collecting on a regular basis.  I was also really impressed by the Health & Wellbeing workshop series that ComVoices (of which Hui E! is a member) hosted last year as part of Mental Health Awareness Week.  Understanding mental health and wellbeing – from both an individual and an organisational perspective – is one of our key outcomes.  We attended and learned from every one of Hui E!’s sessions.” Applause is now growing and currently launching a new partnership with online marketplace, Chooice, as well as bringing some corporate sponsors on board to help provide care packages to kaimahi as a surprise koha for their ongoing contributions.  While Applause’s focus is currently on kaimahi in the housing sector – primarily people who are working to get vulnerable New Zealanders into transitional and emergency housing – Jen is excited to expand to new carer segments soon.  “When we first started, we were a bit broad in our approach.  The work we did with Hui E! helped us to narrow our focus to housing providers first; […]

In 2020, Repair Café Aotearoa New Zealand (RCANZ) grew out of what had previously been Repair Café Auckland. In the two years since, Brigitte Sistig has been working tirelessly in a volunteer capacity to develop a nationwide ecosystem which connects like-minded people, fosters community and creates new life for our broken household items.  “Historically, repair cafés are quite small and localised, but what we’ve done is to form a national organisation which hadn’t previously existed before,” she says. “The intention is to connect all pop-up repair cafés across the country and support them. We are also interested in setting up permanent repair cafés and working together with repair businesses and the education sector.” RCANZ is now umbrella-ed by Zero Waste Network of New Zealand and has partnered with Para Kore with the intention of bringing repair cafés to marae and Māori communities.  It was through her experience with Zero Waste, Brigitte says, that she first became aware of Hui E! Community Aotearoa.  “I remember learning about Hui E! when they first launched, and  attended one of their very first meetings to learn about how they were set up to support organisations like us.” Brigitte wishes that she’d known more about the kinds of support available when RCANZ was in its early days, in particular around navigating the challenging funding landscape.  “We applied twice for substantial funds and were denied one and given a token amount by the other.  It was quite discouraging at the time and it was only afterward that we learned that Hui E! could have connected us with volunteers to help us write those very time-consuming applications.”   It ended up being third-time lucky for RCANZ, who has just recently received some funding through Foundation North which will help them to design a website and contract a part-time coordinator through the end of the year.  Brigitte has since had conversations with Hui E! about where and how the next rounds of funding might be awarded after that, and has joined Hui E!’s network of community organisations.  “I read their newsletters and I’ve attended a couple of their webinars, which I’ve found really informative.  I’m also in discussions with Hui E! about how they can assist with some other voluntary help around aspects like social media.” RCANZ has a busy period ahead, starting with the hand delivery of a ‘Make it our Right to Repair’ petition to the Minister for the Environment, Hon. David Parker.  The hope is that bringing attention to this key environmental issue will ensure mandatory product stewardship design and make it easier and cheaper for New Zealanders to get their items repaired.  In the meantime, RCANZ is continuing to grow its network of repair cafés and Brigitte is busy developing new, shared resources including a co-written, collective repair café manual for use across Aotearoa.   Brigitte says that her time with RCANZ has shown her just how urgently the impact sector needs to find new and better ways to collaborate and share information.  “What’s really been highlighted for me is the fact that the community sector expects so much from its volunteers.  We’re not very good […]

Aute Pasifika Sports Academy has been operating as a voluntary organisation for more than 2 decades, but only decided to register as a New Zealand Charitable Trust in 2020.  In the period since, they have been working with Hui E! to secure funding and grow their impact in the Auckland region.  “We first learned about Hui E! through a mutual collaborator within the Trust.  Since then, Hui E! has been helping us with documentation and providing volunteers to help with fundraising,” says Aute Pasifika Sports Academy’s Tavai Meni.  “Of course, not every grant application is successful, but it’s all part of putting the bait in the sea and seeing if you can get any fish off of it.” The work goes far beyond sport, Tavai says, with a focus on holistic community support for Pasifika families and the wider community.  “We have training programmes to help the younger generations prepare for tomorrow, and projects to help provide discipline and make them more ready for the world.  We also provide a lot of public services for the community through community events.  We have church ministers, community leaders and people from all walks of life here.   We love playing sport together, but we also look after our members, their families and the whole community.” The main support that Hui E! has been able to provide, Tavai says, is in experienced fundraising assistance.  “The problem that we have is that we don’t have the capability within our team to write those funding documents ourselves, and Hui E! was able to connect us with providers who could help.  They also offered us the opportunity to be a part of their wider services through participation in things like industry surveys.” The Academy’s aspiration is to keep offering events and activities to support Auckland’s Pasifika community, Tavai says, with ongoing efforts to expand the services which keep their members and their whānau connected, healthy and moving.  They also hope to build up their digital presence in the months ahead by establishing some online channels to offer their community additional support.  “It’s just one more way to work together,” Tavai says.  “We love working with other groups in the community to extend our services and our mission to more people in Aotearoa.” The hard mahi continues, Tavai says, with ongoing fundraising efforts continuing to support their growing programme and community impact.  With Hui E!’s continued support, he says that the vision for Aute Pasifika Sports Academy’s future is big.  “We have events every week, but we also have plans for the club for tomorrow and the future; we are not raising money so we can sit down and relax.  We are people who love working and building the community.  Every week, every dollar that gets contributed allows us to grow for the benefit of the wider community.”

Auckland’s North Shore is home to the newly established Project Employ, a charity working to prepare young adults with intellectual or learning disabilities for meaningful, paid employment.  Project Employ’s co-Kaiwhakahaere (co-Directors), Diane Eaglesome and  Sarah Dann-Hoare, are committed to creating more inclusive communities and are preparing to open a training cafe in Takapuna to help realise that vision.   “We are creating a cafe which operates just like any other,” Diane says, “except that it also serves as a training space for learning transferable work skills.  Young people between the ages of 18 and 28, who identify with a learning difference, come to us hoping to work in a range of fields – retail, office, hospitality, manufacturing – and we provide them with 1-to-1 or 1-to-2 training which is tailored to their aspirations.” The key, Diane says, is to provide opportunities for Project Employ’s trainees to learn core skills that they can then take elsewhere in the workforce.  “They might be taking an order in the cafe but, through that task, will learn how to engage with people, provide customer service and deliver on a specific request.  Or they might be invited to a team meeting where they’ll learn how to contribute ideas and receive constructive feedback.  What we’ve seen is that, if you are a young person with a learning disability or a difference, it can be very difficult for you to gain work experience and learn those skills; opportunities like summer jobs or jobs for school-leavers aren’t really as open to you.  That’s the gap that we’re filling.” When Project Employ first began its work in June of 2021, Diane and Sarah sought out as much collaboration, support and advice as they could find.  “Initially, we needed to apply for funding under the umbrella of partner organisations such as Autism New Zealand and Poly-Emp while we spent those early months adding to our skill sets and establishing Project Employ as its own charitable organisation.”  It was during this early phase of research and exploration that Diane first connected with Hui E! Community Aotearoa.  “We reached out to a lot of organisations during that time and built relationships with like-minded people who were aligned with what we were trying to do.  As a result, we ended up attending some of Hui E!’s webinars including ‘Creating a One-Sentence Statement for What You Do’ and ‘Fundraising in the Time of COVID’, both of which were really great.  We were able to clarify some of our thinking, set ourselves up for successful funding applications and connect with others who support us and love what we’re doing.” As a new startup which needed funds before it could really start, Diane and Sarah knew that they had a lot of fundraising to do in order to get the cafe doors open.  A volunteer grant-writer from Hui E! was able to lend her expertise on a particularly tricky grant, and with that grant and subsequent funding now secured, their dream is about to become a reality.  “We were very strategic and targeted about what funds we applied for and, because of that, we were successful in […]

Like most of us, the community at Wharekawa Marae in north-east Waikato has had to adapt a lot over the recent pandemic period.  Wharekawa’s Kaiwhakahaere (Administrator), Eddie Manukau, says that the journey has been one of learning, supporting the community and focusing on wellbeing.  “This role is a new working space for me as I studied a Bachelor’s of Education and was previously on that pathway, but Wharekawa is my marae and, when this new position arose due to some heavy Crown investment, it felt like a really big opportunity to do something meaningful.  As Kaiwhakahaere, I am now tasked with milestones related to the Building Resilient and Sustainable Communities project.  This includes a body of work to increase the wellbeing of members of our marae and the local community.” Eddie embraced the opportunity to gain the skills to best tackle his new role and, during this process, he reached out to existing contacts who connected him with Hui E! Community Aotearoa.  “I came across Hui E! through networks that I’ve been involved in for the last few years, namely an organisation called Te Kotahi A Tamaki which is a collective of marae in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland).  Through their networks, I was given an opportunity to upskill myself through a grant writing programme that Hui E! were offering.”  Of course, COVID had other plans, and Eddie quickly found himself in more of an emergency response role than an administrator role, which pushed immediate fundraising needs to the side. When he came on board as Kaiwhakahaere, Eddie had planned to split his time between his home in Tāmaki Makaurau and the marae in Kaiaua but, in the midst of a new Delta-wave lockdown in August of 2021, Eddie was faced with a choice: get locked down at home in Auckland and try to support Wharekawa remotely, or leave his own whānau (family) at home in Auckland and work through the lockdown more-or-less alone in Kaiaua.  He chose the latter. With the changing pandemic landscape came an increased priority on health and wellbeing, Eddie says, and he was excited to participate remotely in Hui E!’s 4-week Tumu Ora wellbeing programme during that lockdown period.  “The programme came along when I was isolated from my whānau and living alone.  It was really appealing as a way to keep a tab on my own personal wellbeing, which was getting pretty challenging at points.  Tumu Ora helped me to stay connected and focused; it was a good forum to meet others in similar roles who, maybe, also saw their mental health coming to the fore because of the pandemic.  The facilitator was really good at focusing on those personal elements and making the content accessible.” As part of the Hui E! network and with the ongoing support of Te Kotahi A Tamaki, Eddie says he’s been able to continue gaining skills and connections relevant to his role.  “The networks of support that we were able to access through Te Kotahi A Tamaki, including both Hui E! and ANCAD (Auckland North Community and Development), have been very diverse and not necessarily Māori-centric, so I have since […]