Te Pātaka goes from throwing open pantry doors to growing food with families food bank

Sunday, 26 December 2021

After the dust had settled from the immediate Covid-19 emergency response last year top of the south iwi realised their work helping with the need in the community for help would have to keep going.

A year and a half on, Te Pātaka’s pantry doors are still open and triage has moved into growth and sustainability.

Te Pātaka kaiarataki (leader) Joshua Joseph said when the initial programme started, no one knew how far it would grow.

The organisation started in Wairau or Marlborough providing kai and firewood to whānau in need in July last year, growing from the response the eight iwi of Te Tauihu to help support their people during the coranavirus pandemic.

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Kaiarataki Joshua Joseph said the need for kai packages had highlighted a lack of resiliency in the region, something which he hoped Te Pātaka’s māra kai (vegetable gardens) would help alleviate.

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“We had no idea if we could afford to buy laptops. Then we had people like Crown Lifts donating trucks … private donors who donated tens of thousands of dollars, Opal packaging donating boxes,” Joseph said.

Dr Lorraine Eade, centre-right, with Te Pūtahitanga chairman Tā Mark Solomon at the signing of a funding agreement for Te Pātaka last year.

“Even though they are small gestures, they go a long way with providing whānau assurance about where their package has come from,” he added. “It’s all huge costs we wouldn't have been able to afford.”

From one Wairau location, the response spread over to Nelson and Whakatū Marae and was cemented as a long-term Te Tauihu programme in September 2020, supplying food packages to struggling whānau across the top of the south.

“We’re looking at sustainability now,” Joseph said. “We’ve secured a new site in Richmond … so our reach is just a bit wider so more whānau can get support.”

And that support is just as crucial as ever. Joseph said people had little resilience left, after a year and a half of disruption.

“What was significant throughout the last iteration of Covid was the amount of need that exposed itself,” he said.

Te Pātaka (The Pantry) grew from an immediate triage response to Covid-19 into a thriving charity organisation feeding hundreds of whānau and helping people become more self-sufficient over a year and a half.

“In the period of about 10 days we had about 400 whānau referred – we were used to about 20 referrals per week.

“That highlighted the state of affairs: Maybe our communities aren’t as resilient as we would like them to be.”

This was why Te Pātaka was working with collaborative iwi trust Te Kotahi o Te Tauihu to take steps further up the food-chain.

While the boxes of kai from Te Pātaka would still be available for those in immediate need, whānau ready and able to take steps towards self-sufficiency could now get their own māra kai, raised garden-beds to grow vegetables, Joseph said.

“It’s all about learning how to do it, and support to continue to develop the ability to support yourselves and the community, if you have a surplus. The need for Te Pātaka will not disappear overnight, but we hope to see a transition.”

Joseph said the support of Te Kotahi and the backing of the eight Te Tauihu iwi had been crucial to Te Pātaka as an ongoing organisation, helping keep the balance of taking care of Māori across the wider region regardless of iwi, and not turning any whānau in need away regardless of ethnicity.

He said in particular that Dr Lorraine Eade, kaiwhakahaere (trust operations manager) of Te Kotahi o Te Tauihu, “needs a medal” for the work she and Te Kotahi have done.

Eade came on board with the trust in March this year, just a month after it was formed. She said the first year of the trust was focusing on the emergency response, with funding from the Ministry of Social Development, Te Pūtahitanga, and other organisations helping to run a “parallel” triage to the Civil Defence response.

The trust’s strategy had a strong focus on sufficiency and supporting Māori whānau, including having one member of every Māori household employed by brokering connections between people looking for jobs and potential employers.

The trust had also worked with four marae across the rohe (region) to develop emergency management plans to prepare for future events, providing emergency containers including generators, kai, first aid kits and Civil Defence packs.

“We’re holding our first CIMS (Co-ordinated Incident Management System) course soon, so that our Māori community can build resilience and preparedness for emergencies to come – with global warming we are likely to see more of these events.”

The trust’s work was branching out with partnerships with organisations like Massey University to provide up to 15 scholarships, with NMIT to support Māori in trades training, and with health providers working on the vaccine roll-out.

“We’re lucky we have eight iwi general managers at the table on the Trust Board in support, and ultimately, whānau is at the centre of everything we do. That’s why we are here.”

The eight iwi of Te Tauihu are Ngāti Apa ki te Rā Tō, Te Ātiawa o te Waka-ā-Māui, Ngāti Koata, Ngāti Kuia, Ngāti Rārua, Rangitāne o Wairau, Ngāti Tama, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira ki Wairau.