Project helps homeless find their roots

Auckland street dwellers Wally Kupeka (left) and Soul work on the collaborative vegetable patch at Orakei Marae. Photo / Sarah Ivey

A group of Auckland's homeless have become part-time gardeners, thanks to a collaboration involving Ngati Whatua and the city's young business leaders.

Ngati Whatua has given up part of its "whenua rangatira", the land of its chiefs around Orakei Marae at Bastion Point, for homeless people to start a vegetable garden to supply the Auckland City Mission's foodbank.

The project is creating connections to both the land and their own people for streeties and ex-streeties such as sickness beneficiary Mike Flowers, 42, who describes himself as "half-cast" but doesn't know his iwi.

"I love plants, I'm a green-finger," he said, as a cold wind blew in from the sea yesterday. "The weather doesn't worry me."

He was sexually abused as a child and suffered brain damage in a car accident as a young man, but has been living in a flat for the past six months and would like to get a gardening or landscaping job eventually.

"I really want to go a bit further, more notches in my belt," he said.

Rex Thorndon, 50, who is still homeless, said he had been waiting for a Housing NZ house for 10 years and had been in and out of hospital this year with pneumonia.

"This is something to do," he said. "I'm a volunteer at the City Mission, I clean the foodbank three days a week. This will be two days a week."

City Mission homeless team leader Wilf Holt said varying numbers of four to six streeties had spent two days a week gardening since late September.

"In some cases people have time on their hands which, with their drug and alcohol addictions, plays into the addiction's hands," he said. "Now they are too tired at the end of the day."

He initially approached Ngati Whatua when he heard that they were holding community planting days around Matariki, the Maori New Year in July. He put the word out among the streeties, 70 per cent of whom are Maori, and took busloads of about 40 volunteers up to Orakei twice - the second time in driving rain.

"There was this wanting to participate in something larger than themselves," he said.

"There was the fact that it was on a marae. There was just this desire to perhaps reconnect."

Five young business people, picked as "future Auckland leaders" for a programme run by the Committee for Auckland, helped the City Mission, the homeless and Ngati Whatua to draw up a formal memorandum of understanding.

Ngati Whatua trustee Ngarimu Blair said the iwi jumped at the chance to help.

"We are reaching a phase in our revitalisation in Auckland where we can more and more begin to look at how we can help others," he said.

The supervisor of the iwi's plant nursery, Te Hira Hawke, said the streeties were good workers.

"I always thought they were mostly drunkards," he said. "They're not. Some people here have some really hard-luck stories. They're not drink or drug-dependent, they've just had a hard time."

He appealed to the public for gardening tools, shade cloths, poles, seeds, seedlings and topsoil - "anything to do with gardening".

"We need a bit of help to help them," he said. "I know there are people out there that are kind-hearted."

* Te Hira Hawke, 027 622 0113.