PAT Magill, OBE and Justice of the Peace, is still firing at 86 as he continues to work with those marginalised by society.
Whanau/families are the key to aspirations of success and so are better-resourced community groups and NGOs like Restorative Justice, he says.
"Our own volunteers and NGOs are the most effective groups in the community and are the key to early intervention. They are seldom given the right amount of support and recognition as the most effective to prevent future victims."
Mr Magill pointed to the recent White Paper on Vulnerable Children which, he says, shows the inability of the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) to respond to community volunteers and the NGOs.
"It [MSD] had the enthusiasm to employ the likes of former All Black Norm Hewitt to stimulate wide interest for submissions to the paper."
That campaign cost millions, he says, yet when Mr Magill applied for $250 a month funding for a year toward his support of criminology student Hannah Bentley, who was interviewing women who had been incarcerated at Arohata Prison, he was told: "That's not in our brief."
He says the department missed the point because that exactly is what the "brief" is about.
"We want to interview the women to gauge any future support required towards improving the quality of life for all citizens of Napier.
"The Quakers, James Barnes and barrister Russell Fairbrother have come to my aid."
He says Paula Bennett's white paper fails to identify that, through a whanau ora process, there is hope.
"There is no understanding in her white paper, no empathy for the pangs of colonisation, now urbanisation, the shaming, the lack of meaningful employment, liveable support and adequate housing that all contribute to making urban living so difficult for many."
He says anything is possible if we collectively look for it and work towards an outcome.
Mr Magill was in Wanganui last week to visit released prisoner Stuart Murray Wilson at his home outside Whanganui Prison.
"My original letter to the Wanganui Chronicle prompted Murray to phone me. He is aware I am interested in what makes him tick, rather than associating him with the term 'beast'.
"He is very intelligent, but I have a hunch that possibly his reluctance to talk to the prison system over 18 years is that in his own early life he may have suffered state institutional violence."
Mr Magill believes that, for Mr Wilson, "given time and confidence in himself, anything positive is possible".
Mr Magill's work started in Napier in the '60s, when the businessman put his own money into helping the vulnerable.
"We, as a people, have no hope if we do not look for and find cures for our planet and our better caring for all people. It was that focus that prompted my visit to Murray."
In the '70s, Mr Magill was on the inaugural council of the first community college in Taradale. The idea for a non-vocational community college to give second-chance opportunities to those who had earlier fallen through the education cracks came from Norman Kirk.
The committee hired Dr John Harre, who came to Napier from his position at the South Pacific University in Fiji.
Mr Magill said all those who applied for the position had to come from the premise that they supported the community, marae, and those in rural areas.
But the Muldoon era came and swept community colleges aside.
"This left a gap, because traditional agencies were not equipped to respond to community needs."
This was also where Mr Magill met the late Dr John Robson when he came to review the work the college was doing.
Dr Robson became Victoria University's first criminologist and, with the late Ralph Hana, a former Secretary for Justice, was successful in abolishing the death penalty in 1962.
Mr Magill says that, from his observation, New Zealand in general has become a punitive society and that we fail to recognise that the answers to our problems lie within our communities.
"There are forces in our communities, like the Sensible Sentencing Trust, that are not offering solutions to address the problems of crime that the public are worried about."
He points to that group and politicians who look to America for the solutions to law and order.
"America has a punitive model of criminal justice, from the death penalty to three strikes. But it [three strikes] has failed and now they're having to let them out because it's too expensive to keep them incarcerated."
He says the New Zealand model has been focused on punishment over the years, without solutions, and little example set for those at school to understand that kids in the community hold the key.
Mr Magill holds up those who have found solutions: there's Judge Mick Brown, who established the Family Group conferencing which became a world model in restorative justice, and Sir Rodney Gallen and Judge Joe Williams, who loathed sending people to prison.
"Rodney said prisons were more violent than the communities they came from."
Napier, he says, has the Napier Pilot City Trust (prisoner release) programme, which has been working since the '70s, and focuses on helping Hawke's Bay women prisoners reintegrate back into the community.
"I see so much good in people working at all levels in the community, under-resourced and under siege.
"That's where our strengths lie, not locking people up and throwing away the key. And if the kids at school think that, we're in deep trouble.
"You have to fix it at the grass roots."