A suicide prevention measure: Christchurch's Youth Hub

Saturday, 18 April 2026

It looks as though a small village has been under construction behind a blue fence on Salisbury St in inner-city Christchurch. This is what happens when a long-held dream finally takes physical shape.

The dream belongs to Dame Sue Bagshaw, who takes The Press on a tour of Youth Hub Christchurch. She describes what can be seen and what is still to come. Her speech is soundtracked by the buzz of saws and the noise of builders’ radios.

But the builders should be gone soon, and an events centre capable of holding 200 young people will open in around a month. The Christchurch City Council paid for most of it with $2 million from the Capital Endowment Fund.

“Supporting Youth Hub Christchurch is the right thing to do,” Mayor Phil Mauger said in a press release.

What is a youth hub? It is a complex of offices, resources, meeting rooms and living spaces. The first stage opened 18 months ago, but there is much more to do.

Some first impressions. The atrium is an attractive, light-filled space. There are beautiful tukutuku panels on the wall, a pool table, an original Street Fighter II video game and a small display of impressive photos taken by someone who lives in the hub’s housing complex.

There are five small meeting rooms and two large ones on the ground floor, and the youth health centre, Te Tahi.

Look up: artist David Trubridge did the stylish lampshades. The hub bought one and Trubridge donated the rest.

“Stories like that abound,” Bagshaw says.

When the Youth Hub won the Warren and Mahoney Civic, Health and Arts Property Award in the Property Industry Awards in 2025, chief judge Andy Evans noted approvingly that “a good building should be designed around the people who use it”. Other innovations were praised, including the use of Māori cultural elements.

Look ahead: there will be a rongoā garden, a cafe and a craft space. When the cafe is open, they can start running cooking lessons and barista training.

There are offices for organisations, ranging from Youthline and the Christchurch City Mission to the lesser-known Egg Academy, which brings young people who meet in the virtual world back into the real one. The idea of co-location is to put like-minded organisations under one roof, where they might bump into each other in the staffroom and swap ideas.

The housing area has 22 rooms for young people living on-site, with a shared kitchen and lounge.

“The Methodist Mission runs it like a big flat,” Bagshaw says.

It is always at capacity, and 10 people want a room every time one becomes vacant. The average stay is about six months but a couple of them have stayed for a year so far.

Bagshaw says they have housed 50 young people over the past year. Of them, 15 have gone flatting, “which was always our dream”, and six have gone back to their families.

While the Youth Hub caters for young people aged 10 to 24, the housing is aimed at those from 16 upwards who are at risk of homelessness. Some have been living in cars, or couch-surfing, or dealing with unsafe situations at home. They need to be on a Ministry of Social Development housing list and working towards education, employment, training or volunteering.

Some were not ready and were asked to leave, but were given a youth coach for a further three months.

On the other side of the complex, facing Gracefield Ave, you have to imagine 10 self-contained apartments designed with young would-be parents in mind. The bedrooms will be big enough for a couple and a cot and the family can stay as long as the cot still holds the baby. But that part of the dream depends on further fundraising.

Stage one cost $21m and another $26m is needed.

Outside, there is an activities courtyard which is not supposed to be called a basketball court. Young people collaborated on the mural facing the courtyard, which features a tree, a whale, books and a taniwha.

“The taniwha was designed and painted by one young person who was going nowhere and didn’t really know what she was doing,” Bagshaw says. “Then she got a scholarship and is enrolled at the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury. It’s a beautiful story.”

Bagshaw’s husband, Dr Phil Bagshaw, who has been quietly trailing behind like a royal consort, chimes in.

“So much healing happens,” he says.

The Bishop’s gift

The Bagshaws do not need much introduction in Christchurch, or in medical circles in New Zealand. As doctors motivated by a keen sense of social justice and champions of the public health system, they have pioneered new ways of treating patients. For Phil Bagshaw, it was the Canterbury Charity Hospital founded in 2007. The Youth Hub Christchurch has an equivalent place for Sue Bagshaw, as the culmination of a long career in youth health and mental health.

They often work as a team. Phil Bagshaw is a Youth Hub trustee just as Sue Bagshaw is on the Charity Hospital Trust.

If there was a Bagshaw family crest, it would feature the word “determination”. But in this dream, they were assisted by a possibly unlikely third party.

Victoria Matthews was the Anglican Bishop of Christchurch from 2008 to 2018. A Canadian and the first woman to ever hold the position, she had the bad luck to be in charge when earthquakes damaged the city’s Anglican cathedral. She was on the side of demolishing and building anew, but others wanted to restore the old. In the end, the restorers won.

When Matthews left, she told the Bagshaws she wanted to leave a legacy for the city’s youth as something positive after the painful cathedral debate. The diocese bought an old bowling club site for $4m and leased it to the Youth Hub for a peppercorn lease of just $1 per year.

The Bagshaws hoped to get Matthews back for the official opening in 2024 but she could not make it. They may still persuade her to visit.

Fundraising included $10m from the shovel-ready initiative in 2020 and the support of Christchurch charities such as the Rātā Foundation and the Wayne Francis Charitable Trust.

Now it is a model for others. Sue Bagshaw has heard that Dunedin and Masterton want to do something and a group from Wellington came to visit.

“I said, you don’t need a grand building like this. We had the opportunity after the earthquakes to make a grand building. You need housing, you need services and you need activities for mental health stuff, in one place. And the staff need to learn to collaborate.”

Collaboration follows co-location. Bagshaw’s 198 Youth Health Centre closed in 2010 after 15 years as a one-stop shop for youth health. It reopened after the earthquakes as the 298 Youth Health Centre with 17 organisations operating out of five wooden houses. Then the leases ran out.

“We decided to purpose-build. Every single organisation has always been kicked out of their premises by landlords.”

When she meets potential funders, her pitch is to sell the Youth Hub as a suicide-prevention venture. The most pressing need for local youth, she says, is face-to-face contact with people.

“Having pro-social friends, linking with a caring adult, learning a skill and being part of a group. That’s what we want to provide.”

We have a traumatised generation, specifically in Christchurch.

“We’ve got way more anxiety,” she says. “It’s coming in a cohort wave. The kids who were in utero or in their first two years of life when the earthquakes happened, their brain development changed because everything was moving around them for so long.”

When Governor-General Dame Cindy Kiro opened the Youth Hub, she reinforced that point by citing the famous Dunedin Study, which “shows us that our formative years are critical in shaping who we become as adults”.

For Christchurch’s kids, there was more to come. The earthquakes were followed by the mosque shooting, “which brought it all back again, and then they had Covid and isolation, which is never good for young people, and screen time,” Bagshaw says.

While she does not support the idea of an under-16 social media ban, she thinks there should be more controls on the tech companies

“They should have the same rules as any other media.”

Alcohol and drugs are forbidden on site, but vaping is permitted in the garden. And it was fair to say it was not easy to overcome neighbourhood resistance and win resource consent.

“Someone put around a rumour we were getting people from borstal,” she says.

Of course New Zealand has not had borstals for more than 40 years.

Resource consent came with conditions, including the need to have a security guard on site. Following an Environment Court mediation process, the hub’s managers have quarterly meetings with the neighbours, who “are now settling down, the anxiety has gone down, and they realise this isn’t that bad,” Bagshaw says.

There has even been some outreach. At Halloween, Egg Academy ran a Treat or Trick, a reversal in which young people gave lollies to neighbours. At Christmas, they baked brownies and went door-to-door.

Marjorie Manthei, secretary of the Victoria Neighbourhood Association, says the community liaison has been working well, although there are recurring problems with traffic and parking on Gracefield Ave.

“The hub management is responsive and tries to address problems as they arise,” Manthei says. She adds they “will be monitoring the use and impact of the hub’s new events centre”.

At the peak, there were 22 complaints in one month, Bagshaw says. They were mostly about noise. Sometimes it was not their own: the hub even received complaints when Ed Sheeran played across town in Addington.

Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll

As a couple, the Bagshaws have similarities and differences. One key difference is that Phil Bagshaw worked inside the system as a surgeon, and was chair of the New Zealand branch of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and on the Canterbury District Health Board, before disillusionment led to the founding of the Canterbury Charity Hospital.

On the other hand, Sue Bagshaw says she was never in the system. She has a more rebellious spirit, as she demonstrates with her short biography.

“People have long-winded introductions for when I’m a speaker but basically I say, ‘I worked for Family Planning and learned to talk about sex. I worked for the methadone programme and learned how to talk about drugs and mental health. So I’ve got lots in common with young people. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.’”

She accepted her damehood largely because it would help with fundraising and other important connections. And it has.

“The backing in Canterbury has been phenomenal,” Phil Bagshaw says, referring to both projects.

There are two aspects to that. People are generous here, and they want to prove Christchurch is still the people’s republic and can do its own thing.

Sue Bagshaw sees both the Charity Hospital and the Youth Hub as products of community, rather than the work of one person.

There is another thing the two projects have in common.

“They’re not add-ons,” Phil Bagshaw says. “They’re essentials.”

He is often approached by people who want help setting up charity hospitals elsewhere. Southlanders opened one last year and Wellington has one on the way. But this is not a positive trend.

As he said to 1 News during a recent story on Wellington’s charity hospital: “The happiest day of my life would be if I could hang a sign on the door that said ‘Not needed anymore, public hospital that way.’

“There should never be a need for charity hospitals. The Government is supposed to provide adequate, free healthcare for the public.”

What would be the equivalent for the Youth Hub?

“We’ll always need the Youth Hub,” Sue Bagshaw says. “The great day will be when young people’s mental health is so improved, they don’t think about suicide any more.”