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About Us Community & Education Centre Youth, Sports & Recreation Trust Safer Street Projects
Our Project was a two-year contract that has been
operating since June 1997. It has successfully
continued to run and funded up to 2001 by
the Wellington Crime Prevention Unit.
There are three separate programme locations nationally
within the project.
The sites are: Otangarei - Whangarei, Otara - Manukau City,
Pomare - Lower Hutt.
Each project had similar issues but very different environments.
"But" first let us tell you what we had inherited over many years
as a community at the onset of the project:
Stat figures provided by relevent agencies & departments
57 % Blantant Domestic Violence
44 % Truency
53 % Grafitti & Vandalisum
39 % Drug dealing houses
59 % Transit Housing NZ Tenants
54 % Speeding Motorists
58 % Children & Youth coming to CYFS notice
43 % Burgalaries & Crimes per total of Whangarei
As part of the project each site was required to undertake the following activities:
1. A club for 7-13 year olds in the area, meeting regularly and
operating activity and discussion sessions
2. The formation (or rejuvenation) of small neighbourhood
support groups
3. Organisation and execution of safety audits
4. Community strengthening activities.
Some of the requirements early in the start we found were not
appropriate to our community so we made changes.
Those changes were:
We set up a centre to run our projects through, we held community
meetings instead of small neighborhood groups. We consulted
and worked from what our community wanted to see and have.
We engaged our community and with their support made immediate
visual changes to our local community, we sought the help of everyone.
We said enough was enough, when crimes are witnessed make that
call as you could be next. We built up on our strengths as a community.
Strong sports committments along with our Kapa Haka brought us
together in unity. From these we built on ourselves and our pride of
what our community actually is about. We began to see reduction if
only minor it was a start.
We knew we weren't alone and that we had the support of services
and other agencies. Our community no longer felt it was at the bottom
of the heap! But in fact an up and coming area. We have a long way
to go but are prepared to keep working towards our goals of a safe
and friendly community with new innovative ideas and projects.
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