Sarah | Clarence River, Canterbury

“I guess there’s a whole ton of influences. I’m thinking in regard to Te Hā o Mātauranga, which is our little community hub that we’re in at the moment. We set this up three years ago, and I think my drive and my push that got this going.

I think what influenced me was that I worked as a probation officer for Corrections for nearly two years, and that was a real eye-opener to me, to see how much people want to make changes, but are not supported to make change. So often my clients were going, ‘I really want to make this change’, but when I looked as a probation officer, you don’t have time to walk alongside them the whole time. But I was looking for people to refer them to in Kaikōura, and there was very little here to do that step by step support. I think there’s a lot more now, ironically, four years later, but at the time, there wasn’t much. I guess that was a really big influence in my life and my career journey and thinking about the community as to why I pushed hard to get this little community hub open. 

Te Hā o Mātauranga, this little community hub in Kaikōura, we started it up because people were saying they wanted more support to try to upskill, to be confident, just basically needing people to be yes-people to their ideas. We see ourselves as enablers. Our aim to enable people to achieve their dreams is sometimes a really little dream. Sometimes that’s a big dream. We’ve had people come in and want to start up a community garden, so we’ve got a little community garden out the back.   We’ve had people come to us with dreams about having a Pātaka Kai, sharing place for food, and now we’ve supported them to do that, and there’s a couple around Kaikōura. So that’s kind of our dream, that people are more confident, more optimistic, and that we can support them to make those steps along the way. 

I guess my mum and dad, as with most people, are really huge influences in my life. My mum and dad were quite out of the box people, and we were brought up in quite a free way.  We grew up in North Canterbury and I was there for the first 13 years of my life, but during that time, spent a year in Tonga, and my mum and dad were teaching with VSA. We spent a year off school, and both Mum and Dad were teaching, so we spent a year swimming and snorkelling and having an amazing time.   My mum and dad made a lot of contacts with Tongan people at that time and when we came back, we eventually ended up in the Hokianga Harbour in Northland, which was a really big change from North Canterbury to Northland. And we had a community with a group of Tongans from Auckland.   So, we bought a farm and there were two houses on the farm. One house was a Tongan family, and the other house was us, and we used to have groups of Tongans come up from Auckland to work the gardens, and we had a big market garden. So, Mum and Dad were always doing lots of different things, and I think had a big influence on who I was. I think also going from North Canterbury, which wasn’t a bi-cultural place to live, up to Northland was a really good experience for me. It opened my eyes to that Māori, cultural side of life, and it was a bit of a shock, but a real learning curve, and I value it above many things in my life, that I got to grow up in the Hokianga Harbour.   

I trained as a secondary teacher. I had worked on and off in teaching, and when I was teaching, it’s the kids who were struggling in school systems that I’m drawn to. I have an affinity for those who don’t fit easily into the systems that we’ve got them in and that’s why I then decided to have a go at being a Probation Officer. I guess it’s those experiences, working in Probation, with the tamariki and the rangitahi who don’t fit easily into schools, that have made me really aware that we need to work from a strengths-base. We need to value what people bring, what everybody brings, not just the ones that fit our systems. So, that’s the journey that led me to open Te Hā, and we’ve been incredibly lucky to be supported by the JR McKenzie Trust, and they’ve been completely influential in the way we’ve developed this place. They’ve supported us to remain really strength-based, to remain really true to our values. Because they were a very high trust funding organisation, they didn’t give us a whole set of criteria we had to meet. They really trusted that we were making the right decisions for our community, which is pretty rare in funders, these days. They also provided us with mentoring, which was amazing, to have people that have been working in this space for a long time, to walk alongside us. At the heart, we have two values. At the heart of Te Hā o Mātauranga, one is to be strength-based and one is to be transparent about what we’re doing, because I think often with NGOs, the funding is competitive funding and people keep their business to themselves, and they’re not transparent about what they do, which creates a competitive environment which isn’t a healthy one for people trying to support the community. We’re working with young people so transparency is incredibly important so that they know that we don’t have any hidden agendas. We’re not trying to get them anywhere that they don’t want to go. It’s about supporting their journey rather than us heading them in a direction. 

Pride’s a funny thing. Every now and again I’ll go, actually yeah, this is really cool, but mostly I’m constantly looking for the next growth, the next step. I guess that’s my strength, is to be a mover and a driver. But having said that, I know that every now and again when I write up a funding application, and for a funding application you have to sell what you’re doing, and you go, oh actually we are doing good stuff with people, and every now and again you’ll get that Rangitahi who comes to you and says, this has made a huge difference, thank you, and those moments, you can sit with, but to be honest, I don’t sit with it very often, because I’m always looking for the next thing.”