For the past 40 years Papakura Support and Counselling Services has been providing a range of valuable support assistance to their community. While the agency started out as a Women’s Refuge, staff soon identified that community concerns were not just focussed on women, but on families and their desire to meet a wider range of needs within their South Auckland community. It was at that point the agency branched out to offer an expanded range of services, introducing counselling support and personal development workshops, including anger management, self-esteem and parenting courses.

The centre has six permanent staff and contracts tutors to deliver in specialised areas. Funding for most services is provided through the Ministry of Social Development and Oranga Tamariki, with up to 500 people from the Franklin and Papakura districts accessing services each year.

Centre values include:
Aroha, Hope, Respect, Empathy and Manaakitanga.

And the mission statement is:
We aim to create a safe place where opportunities of healing and growth are nurtured to enable healthy choices and realise dreams.

Silver Kilivia is the Community and Cultural Relationships Manager and he says their focus is on providing people with the tools and skills to enable them to identify and then access the resources they need to continue with their personal growth.

“The parenting courses that we run include a two-hour session once a week for six weeks. They are usually small group sessions with a maximum of eight people. In our parenting courses we provide the tools to help keep family units strong through the teaching and sharing of communication skills and using role play to help navigate issues successfully. Our workshops are slightly different to the traditional delivery of learning in that we explore different perspectives on intervention with the kaupapa set by the participants.

“We also run a course called ‘Liking who I am’ which is all about developing self-esteem. Learners are supported to explore self-confidence, self-assertiveness and communication, alongside a range of other tools,” Silver says.

During 2023, the service identified the need to offer community-based support for whānau of Rainbow rangatahi in South Auckland and successfully applied for a small professional development grant from ACE Aotearoa.

“We wanted to deliver a series of workshops that would bridge knowledge gaps between rangatahi in the Rainbow community and their whānau. We knew from feedback that there were whānau who were struggling to manage their relationships with their children in the Rainbow Community and there was very little, if any, other support or learning channels for them.”

Silver says the workshops offered a blended approach, providing both educational and support modules to address this sometimes-challenging journey.

“Topics we covered included grief and loss, reducing barriers, gender minority theory, legal rights, coming out or disclosing, safety and risk, and pronouns, among other topics. We know that whānau support is one of the strongest protective factors for Rainbow young people and the workshops we delivered equipped parents and caregivers with the tools to process their experiences and communicate appropriately. We provided a safe environment for people to engage and discuss with their peers and with relevant content.”

Workshops were held weekly for six weeks and enabled parents and caregivers to explore and articulate their journey as a parent/caregiver of a Rainbow young person. The workshops were facilitated by a Rainbow Safe facilitator and there were about seven people on each course.

“I want to stress that this was not a case of whānau who were unaccepting of their children’s choice, but rather about providing a safe space for them to reshape their thoughts based on facts and education,” says Silver.

He confirmed that this workshop topic is a massive and very specialised area to navigate and, as a small provider, the ACE grant enabled them to connect with the most qualified people and resources. At each session kai was served which helped to connect people through the sharing of a meal.

“We would like to be able to run the course again in the future, but we will need to secure more funding,” Silver says. “It took us a long time to get to a space where we could deliver on the project competently and it would be a shame to lose that expertise. However, the current climate is hard from a funding point of view, as many other providers in the sector will be aware.”

Feedback from parents who attended was very positive, with several mentioning that many people are forced to navigate this journey without support. Others said, “Thank you for allowing us to meet face to face in South Auckland without the need to travel into the city,” and “Thank you for offering us a space to voice, discuss and unpack our feelings.”