Tane and Anaru - Ex-gang members helping their community

Tane and Anaru are ex-gang members, dedicated to helping people in their community with criminal convictions, who also have low literacy, low educational achievement and few job opportunities due to their convictions.

Their community prefer to do things for themselves and refuse to engage in mainstream services, which they see as the ‘outsiders’. People take them at face value and don’t understand the complexity of their difficult lives. They carry around a sense of collective shame and feel isolated from others because they are constantly judged.

Their community struggles to have the basics – education doesn’t meet their needs, literacy is a major issue, and housing prices are a concern, with people spending most of their income on rent. The supporters are just as vulnerable as those they are supporting.

In their words

"We’re more about developing programmes at levels that are going to fit the community rather than [programmes with] the rules and regulations that do not fit the community."

"Don’t think of us as dumb, we’re the bottom of the basket but we are beautiful people that wanna get to where yous are if you loosen the strings up there. We just want the chance to prove that we can be as clever and as engaged as you are… we haven’t got certificates to say we’re like that but we’ll walk the walk and that’s good enough for us."

"Bring the people out of the ‘hood to help the people in the ‘hood…’ Train up the people in the area and then you’ll see good things coming out."

Tane’s and Anaru’s strengths

• They are well-matched to their own community
• They have energy and commitment to help make changes
• They can reach people that others can’t
• They teach reading and writing to families as a gateway to employment opportunities
• They have established good connections with training centres in the area to provide qualifications for their people.

How can we support this community to thrive?

• Support for community development and enterprise development practices.
• Enhance mana by supporting them to ‘do it for themselves,’ i.e. have their own people trained to deliver services for their community.
• Use a peer-led group programme (e.g. MSD’s MoneyMates) that is delivered by their own community and in a way that takes account of low literacy levels.
• Facilitate another provider or collective to act as an umbrella organisation and be a fund holder e.g. an iwi-based provider to be fund holder and support Tane and Anaru through the tendering process.
• Link in with community-based initiatives such as MSD’s E Tū Whānau initiative.
• Support them to obtain BFC and other social service programme funding.
• Ensure service brokers are non-judgmental (e.g. for employment, education, housing).
• Provide tailored support at different transitions (e.g. to gain tertiary qualifications, coming in and out of prison; in and out of employment).
• Develop models of support that deal specifically with low education, chronic unemployment and high housing costs as a major issue.