Kāinga Ora: Working with the community to create the future for eastern Porirua

Kāinga Ora – Homes and Communities is a New Zealand Crown Entity established to provide tenancy services to nearly 200,000 customers and their whānau and owns and maintains nearly 69,000 public houses. Kāinga Ora focuses on prioritising tenants’ wellbeing, and providing tenants with good quality, warm, dry and healthy homes. 

Te Rā Nui, Eastern Porirua Development is a partnership between Kāinga Ora, Porirua City Council and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. Working in collaboration with Te Pae Whakahou Hapori (the community board established to hold the vision for this project) and community, these organisations are the guardians of an investment that will see Porirua become an even better place to live, work and play for the people of Porirua. Over the next 20 years, Te Rā Nui will see improvements to the total wellbeing of the area. From providing opportunities to build more warm, dry homes, to improving transport, services and facilities, as well as enhancing the local environment for existing and future generations to enjoy. 

The project was announced by the New Zealand Prime Minister in 2018 and community engagement began in 2019. This engagement was extensive and focused on understanding community aspirations early so they could be embedded across all plans and aspects of the project work programme. This engagement was well received and 2,300 people participated. Unfortunately, COVID-19 hit soon after, impacting the ability of the engagement team to close the loop and demonstrate how the feedback would shape project plans. Engagement also had to migrate online, in a neighbourhood where digital poverty is prevalent and online engagement isn’t culturally appropriate. 

By 2022, we were finally able to go back out again. It was clear that a ‘temperature check’ was needed with key community leaders to understand how the community was feeling and how to best re-engage them. This temperature check was completed by Powerdigm and Inspiring Communities from July-September 2022 and key insights included the need for a community reset, giving Te Pae Whakahou Hapori more potency, leveraging community leaders to lead engagement, and doing more to co-create with the community, while committing to long-term meaningful engagement in a culturally appropriate way.

We quickly took action, organising meetings with 62 community groups, churches, NGOs, businesses, government and social service agencies to reset relationships and discuss how to best engage the community. The insights gained through these sessions, informed the approach we took for Hui tahi tātou o Porirua.

These insights included:

• we are visual and we want to see what you are trying to achieve – with pictures, maps, visual aids that make it clear 
• we want to see how you have used the insights we’ve already provided to inform your plans 
• we want to see all of the plans rather than piecemeal engagement on individual plans
• we want you to work with other agencies so you come together to engage, reducing the over consultation (and extraction) which often happens to our community
• we want to help lead the conversation with our people, so that it is culturally appropriate and in our languages so that everyone is able to participate no matter what their cultural background is
• we want you to do more than just engage us on your project, provide us with opportunities through your delivery - ie jobs, self-determination, sharing our art and culture
• make sure young people have a seat at the table too, provide things that are fun so that families get involved together in shaping our community.

• Hui tahi tātou o Porirua was an experiential engagement designed to share the journey of change in eastern Porirua. This occurred through a physical exhibition, supported by the mobilisation of 50 community ambassadors who delivered 42 talanoa sessions in 15 languages to dive deeper into key Te Rā Nui project plans and initiatives as well as how the project and partners could unlock wellbeing outcomes.
• This engagement resulted in us gaining 20,000 community insights provided by 5,427 visitors, including participation by 13 schools. 
• We collaborated with 36 government and social service providers to develop key questions for the talanoa sessions, leveraging the insights to embed community aspirations across work programmes.
• These insights also enabled a final refinement of the Spatial Plan, which has now been approved by Kāinga Ora’s board and our project partners, setting the direction of the project for the next 20+ years.