Coco News

HELP FOR HOMELESS FROM CROSSPOWER NZ & "THE STREET STORE"

"The Street Store" had it's first Pop-Up store in Otara based out of Crosspower New Zealand's premises today.

Crosspower NZ who are a charitable trust based in Otara, Auckland decided to tackle some of the need & poverty they saw in their local community by providing practical help and supplies through The Street Store which they ran out of their dance studio today.

'The Street Store' is the first one officially registered in New Zealand. It's based in South Africa and has now gone world wide as you can register to run one in your country. It is hoped that if it went well today they'll be able to run more of them in different locations - the idea being that it's "Community helping Community"

We spoke to the project manager Casey Smith and organising committee member Charene Siakimotu about how the day was going earlier.

"We've got our first lot of peeps through now, we did some street patrols last week and these are the ones we found on the street so we did a pick up point in Mangere East. This is the first lot and then we've had another van circling around picking people up. We know a couple of the ladies who are regulars and they're always on the street in the same place and so we just told them to let all their friends know" said Casey

"We have free food parcels made up that people can take with them, everything here is free today - free sausage sizzle, clothes, shoes, blankets, toiletries as well and it's all been donated. We also contacted a few organisations like the Manurewa Marae and other places that have taken homeless in like Kingseat after Te Puea Marae closed it's doors I believe. They'll bring a couple of van and car loads of people through so they can pick up clothes. We're really trying to target the right kind of people who really need it" added Charene.

"We had an op shop to start off with that we had to close down and so we had a surplus of clothing which helped but we've had a lot of people donating clothes and shoes as well. With the food donations we've had drop off centres and days here that people could drop off food or donate food to and we also partnered with people like Kiwi Harvest who we worked with and they came in and donated food as well to the food packages"

Apart from this one-off pop-up Street Store, Crosspower NZ also provide a number of services to the community in Otara including a youth and community mentoring service, classes for the community and kids in both their dance and art studios, after school programmes, wood carving lessons for adults and a 'Hood Beats' Programme.

Their main service is MASS IMPACT which is a mentoring service, Charene says "We have about 50 mentees and we do a one on one mentoring programme. We go into homes, to the families and the youth and there's some awesome work going on there. We also have a RTL programme which stands for 'Real Time Learning' that we take to the kids on the street or the ones who have fallen through Alt Ed (alternative eduction) and whatever else and they come in and we teach them basic skills and learning. There's a programme that one of our team has put together and at the moment they're learning how to do Drivers Licensing and all that kind of thing.

We also have a couple of small businesses - so there's a guy who runs a small t.shirt business printing tees and he's done our 'The Street Store' tees. His names Iotua and he's just applied for an AMP scholarship"

It's great to see community based projects helping the people in their communities. Check out Crosspowers website - www.crosspower.org.nz if you're interested in finding out more about the services they provide or if you'd like to volunteer to help in any way.

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