Tāmaki Youth Wellbeing Project

The Tāmaki Youth Wellbeing Project started after a community meeting was held in 2017 in response to a high loss of youth our community experienced to suicide. We wanted to do something to work on prevention and so we worked together to create a united community response to youth suicide prevention. At the beginning of 2018, we shifted our focus after feedback from whānau and youth, to youth wellbeing. With support from the community and receiving some key funding from The Vodafone Foundation and some smaller funds from others, we created eight different ideas that we could work on to build youth wellbeing. Different leads in the community were identified to work on these ideas and we've been working hard to achieve them.

Our ideas are:

  • Building spaces in our community for youth to be able to drop in

  • Growing opportunities for Youth Initiated Mentoring

  • Enabling Story Tellers

  • Creating Stories

  • Developing a Youth Wellbeing Index

  • Connecting with Schools

  • Providing Learning Programmes

  • Running a Peer Support Group

We worked on these ideas from April 2018 to September 2018. We have learned from every single one of these ideas. Some of them flying so well that we couldn't keep up, and others shifting and altering significantly as we learned from our young people about what would work better. Throughout this year, we have been meeting once a month on a Monday night, to reflect and connect with each other. This reflection time has guided our kōrero to stronger collaborations with each other and a desire to work closer in our activities to help build youth wellbeing. Collectively, we're keen to see ongoing unifying of youth wellbeing projects in Tāmaki.

We have just received some amazing news with The Vodafone Foundation coming on board for another six-month sprint from January 2019 to June 2019! We're keen to build on our ideas, and also see what our next steps will be for uniting youth wellbeing projects. If you would like to come along to our night meetings, we meet on the second Monday of the month, 7pm to 9pm at The Peace Experiment (Montessori High School) on the corner of Clifton Court and Pilkington Rd, Panmure. We also have a Facebook Group, just search "Tāmaki Suicide Prevention".

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