Charities are seeing a record level of requests from whānau to support them through winter and a new collaboration in Auckland is helping meet their needs.
Yesterday, The Kindness Collective, Nau Mai Rā and Kootuitui Papakura helped 50 families.
Manaaki Ora is their winter wellness programme pilot, which began on June 21 and continues until July 30.
Fifty whānau received:
- subsidised energy payments through power company Nau Mai Rā's Whānau Fund;
- winter bundles of pyjamas, blankets, hot water bottles and cost-effective heaters from The Warehouse, which were bought by the Kindness Collective;
- Tend Health is a full-service primary healthcare provider that will give whānau free online healthcare;
- food deliveries from My Food Bag’s Bargain Box along with Nadia Lim’s cookbook Saver Flavour and Tegel poultry from Kindness Collective’s foodbank; and
- a new Phillips Air Fryer.
The Kindness Collective
Kindness Collective founder and CEO Sarah Page said requests for food were up 78% from this time last year and requests for winter warmth assistance were up 52%.
Page said Manaaki Ora was launched to do more for families at a time when the Child Poverty Action Group predicts child poverty will rise by 20,000, with no solutions offered by the government.
On top of the cost of living crisis there were effects from the Covid-19 pandemic, floods and Cyclone Gabrielle that had devastated people in the long term.
Page said people who were doing okay last year were no longer able to afford rent or put food on the table as many hardworking families were no longer able to cope with the costs of living.
Targeting energy hardship
Ezra Hirawani and Ben Armstrong are co-founders of Nau Mai Rā, the first kaupapa Māori power provider in Aotearoa, which aims to eliminate energy hardship. They have a Whānau Fund charitable trust that assists people out of energy poverty.
Ben Armstrong (Ngāti Hine, Waikato, Ngāti Maru) said everyone was feeling the impacts of uncontrollable issues including the global recession.
Kootuitui Papakura
The distribution of supplies was at Kootuitui in Papakura. Kootuitui is a charity that provides wraparound services across three strands - education, health and whānau. In education they provide affordable Chrome books to tamariki. They have nurses in schools, with a practice nurse and youth worker at Papakura High School
Tamara Tairakena (Te Āti Awa and Ngāti Raukawa) is a community connector in the whānau strand, which she said has grown over nine years from volunteers working on making homes in Papakura warmer and drier. Now they work with multiple different services, for instance in financial literacy.
One of the biggest challenges Tairakena said was kai relief.