Moving beyond service provision to allow people to connect around their hopes and dreams is the purpose of the Great Start initiative in Taita, Lower Hutt, and spearheaded by Barnados. Barnados, a large and well-respected service provider which supports children and families, is not afraid to take risks and do things a little differently, and it is this openness which allowed Great Start to form.

What is different about Great Start is its focus on community-led development: asking the people who live in Taita - and hence have a real interest in the area’s future – what they want, and finding ways to support them in achieving it.

Great Start began when Barnados realised that standard “drop-in” services weren’t working - instead of simply piloting yet another service the decision was made to ask Taita residents what, if anything, they wanted for themselves and their community.

What they heard was fascinating and powerful.People in Taita wanted to make connections with each other and to be helped to connect with the services that already existed. People weren’t asking for specific services or handouts, but instead for help building a stronger community, and serious long-term commitment rather than a “parachute in, then leave” approach.

As a result, Great Start Taita was born, and has two main aims: connecting people to people, and doing things differently.

Following the decision to talk to residents about, and over a six month period, a Barnardos staff member and a local social work student knocked on the doors of hundreds of Taita homes and took time to talk with people on doorsteps and around kitchen tables. While residents clearly wanted some specific things like a park for kids and adults to use, and phone boxes and bus stops that were useable, their real interest lay in building a stronger community themselves rather than having others come in and do it for them.The other strong message was that if Barnardos was to get involved the organisation had to be prepared to be there for the long haul and not just parachute in and then leave.

A similar message came from conversations with other organisations that worked in the area.Other service providers did not want to compete with each other or with Barnardos. Instead people talked about a strong desire to work together, to support each other and to find different ways of working with the Taita community, not just delivering services to people or ‘clients’ who live there.

Barnardos listened to this feedback and decided that the focus of its work in Taita should be connecting people, providing a space for people to talk and develop community, and facilitating collaboration.

Great Start Taita is a community initiative. It is supported and funded (but not owned) by Barnardos, and it also has support from the Ministry of Social Development through the Early Years Service Hub initiative. It is a loose, informal collaboration of lots of different community groups, service providers and residents who live and work in the Taita area and who are interested in Taita being a great place to live. Great Start has two main aims:

Lots of activities and ideas are being generated by Great Start at the house in Cooper Street:

At the same time ‘working groups’ of service providers, community groups, schools and pre-schools, the local council, and residents are meeting together, often for the first time, to take action on things such as:

Focusing on building relationships - not providing services - is a fundamental part of this different way of working. Karen Clifford (the manager at Great Start) is adamant that the house is not (and will not become) a community hall or centre. Staff at the house work hard to make sure that people don’t just turn up, access a specific service or event, and then leave. Instead, staff spend time making sure that people meet each other, find out about other things that are happening in Taita, share their ideas and become part of creating what happens next.

Karen is also keen to stress that it doesn’t matter if activities happen in the house or not. While the Great Start house provides a wonderful space for all sorts of things to happen Great Start is not about the house. It is about facilitating and supporting collaboration and connections across the whole of Taita and supporting existing networks, relationships and organisations to grow and become stronger and new connections to develop and flourish.

But – more importantly – how do you measure the value of relationships? How do you measure the impact of connections between people from completely different sectors or walks of life? How do you make sure that what you are doing is more than a ‘talkfest’? How do you grow real community leadership? How do you ensure that what is being developed is sustainable, simultaneously reflecting and building a community vision and is truly community-led? And how much of this is actually making a tangible difference for people who live in Taita? How does the whole community – people who live, work, care and invest in the community – work together, intentionally, to make Taita a better place for the future?

These are the questions we are grappling with. For some questions we have the beginning of answers. The partnership with the Hutt City Council – and many others – for the park development is one example. This is not just a park being built but a whole new collaboration of actors creating it together … with local Taita children and adults knowing that they identified the issue and created the opportunity.

The willingness and generosity of Barnardos to ‘blur’ traditional organisational boundaries and to support staff to work in very different ways – along with the ‘peer’ support being provided by Inspiring Communities – is providing a creative safety net for Great Start as it grows and evolves.

This different way of working has not yet proved itself. And there are some tough questions to grapple with. But if the laughter, enthusiasm, enormous energy and commitment, totally unexpected connections, new activities, pride in self and in Taita, hope, cups of tea and chatter (an ever present feature around the Great Start house kitchen table) are any part of the measures of success, then Great Start is definitely on the right track.

Thalia Wright, Karen Clifford, Jenny Blagdon