Making a difference for those in need

FULFILLED: Alan Withy has taken on many roles in his career over the last five decades and is showing no sign of slowing down.PHOTO/JOHN BORREN

Variety is the key to mediator Alan Withy’s longevity writes David Porter.

Mediator, mentor and governance expert Alan Withy has consistently reinvented himself in the course of a lengthy and varied career.

After many years running his own planning consultancy, for the past decade or so he has been widely involved in dispute resolution, particularly in the contractual, employment, organisational and environmental fields, and is active as a resource management commissioner.

He is also an independent director and trustee for several companies and non-profit organisations, including serving for many years as chairman of Homes of Hope, which provides homes for in-need children.

"There's a real need to provide vulnerable children with a refuge - a place they can call home," said Mr Withy, who is based in Tauranga.

"I was on mostly commercial boards in the 1980s and 1990s, but for the past 15 years my focus has been on not-for-profits."

He is also a trustee of Family Link (formerly the Western Bay Mental Health Trust) and Progress To Health, a similar charity operating in Waikato and the central North Island. His plans for next year include serving with Volunteer Service Abroad in Vanuatu.

He was born and brought up in Auckland and, after leaving Auckland Grammar, was the last of the generation that went through a full apprenticeship as a surveyor. After that, training for the profession became a university course.

However, although Mr Withy has since completed a number of university qualifications, he praised the depth of the training he received under the old apprenticeship system, with its combination of practical field experience and intensive evening course study.

A highlight of his surveying experience included taking part in the last of the geodetic control surveys of New Zealand carried out between 1945 and 1967.

"It involved flying around the Southern Alps and Fiordland in a helicopter and camping on the top of mountains doing night star observations," he said. "It was a marvellous experience."

In the late 1960s, he went to university and retooled, getting a graduate diploma in town planning. His first taste of the Bay of Plenty came with a planning role at the Rotorua Council. He went on to work with the state planning authority in Adelaide, Australia, before eventually getting head-hunted to join Murray North Partners in Tauranga, which was then a major multi-discipline engineering and planning firm with offices throughout New Zealand.

He was a director of Murray North from 1976 until 1990 when the firm closed down. He then went out on his own, forming his own consultancy, the Alandale Group of companies, involved with consulting, development, investment, management and planning. He ran the company until 2003 when he sold out his interests to US consulting engineering company Montgomery Watson Harza.

"I was having some health issues, so it suited me to sell out," said Mr Withy, who was 60 at the time he sold the group. Since then my health has recovered."

He now consults under the name Alandale Associates.

Continuing education has been a recurring theme throughout Mr Withy's career. He completed a Bachelor of Social Science with honours, at Waikato University in 1998. After selling his company, he completed a Graduate Diploma of Business Studies in dispute resolution, and a Master of Management in Business at Massey University.

As well as serving on numerous boards, he is currently involved in dispute resolution for several organisations in the Bay, Waikato, Northland - where he is Commissioner for Rolling Review Hearings for the Whangarei District Council - and the South Island. In particular, he specialises in adjudication involving the Resource Management Act.

"I've been fortunate to have had a very wide and varied career," said Mr Withy.

Business consultant Kevin Wearne, an old friend who has worked alongside Mr Withy in a number of governance roles, said his most outstanding characteristic was his absolute integrity.

"And he's tenacious - Alan sticks with projects and hangs in there despite the personal cost to make them work."