A year of change making in south and west Auckland
After school at Auckland Council’s OSCAR Kids Clubs in South Auckland, you’ll likely find young people tucking into healthy, nutritious meals.
The improvement in nutrition is part of our Healthy Families initiative and is just one of the collective of forward-looking projects housed within TSI, and spotlighted in the our Year in Review – 2019 report, out now.
Our team worked with the council’s after school programmes and Kauri Kids early childhood centres in south Auckland to reset budgets, support staff and implement systems that ensure proper investment into consistently healthy kai for tamariki. The result is that more than 38,000 healthier meals have been delivered to young people at the participating centres since the Healthy Families partnership started in September last year.
The 2019 Year in Review reflects on the work achieved by TSI in its four key areas:
Innovation and Technology.
Shared Prosperity.
Tamariki Wellbeing.
Healthy Infrastructures and Environments.
Looking backwards towards the future
An important part of the Year in Review report is to document our key organisational learnings that will drive forward the transformational social and economic change needed for south and west Auckland. COVID-19 has created an extraordinary situation in which our ability to innovate, learn and act is needed more than ever. As a result, we’re now considering how to implement these themes in unprecedented times.
The three key themes that emerged from TSI and TWI’s evaluative learning practice are: mana ā-whānau, unlocking potential and systems innovation.
Mana-ā-whānau:
When working with whānau we have seen positive shifts whenever we hold the strengths, values and expertise of whānau as the central component to creating fit for purpose solutions.
Unlocking potential:
South and west Auckland are abundant in many assets and resources (such as knowledge, tools, community collaboration, aspiration) and we are seeing huge opportunities for impact when we can re-imagine the way these assets are brought together and expose the capacity and strengths within communities.
Systems innovation:
Creating transformative change requires us all to think and act differently, to identify the habits that might not be positively influencing wellbeing and be prepared to change them. This takes time and bravery; we’ve been working alongside community and government teams to test and trial new ways of doing things that can create the kind of change we all want to see in our communities.
Every response to COVID-19 presents a chance to disrupt, re-wire or reimagine how our local and central government systems can change the trajectory of development to one that fosters positive lifelong wellbeing. But to do this, we must ensure an equitable recovery for south and west Auckland and Māori and Pasifika peoples.
Gael Surgenor, Director of TSI says, “Now is a chance to strive for much more than a return to the way things were. Instead, we need to continue to focus on opportunities that enhance our communities, be it in building a new sustainable and inclusive economy for Māori and Pasifika businesses, enabling tamariki to thrive by continuing to create opportunities for a better system of support for whānau or unlocking alternate pathways for young people.”
See: Year in Review – 2019.