April 2007 - Richard Aston

I have been working on details of our national expansion over April.

The intial part of the work in deciding which NZ towns to target I called “due diligence”, ie backgrounding pontetial towns to see if we are needed there, if other organisations are doing the work already, what local funding sources are there and if the local community groups would support us opening up in their town. The first obvious target was Hamilton but our due diligence process revealed one community group who were quite reluctant to support us, they had a mentoring programme in place that while not in the same area of need as ours did recruit mentors. They were worried we would take all the male mentors in Hamilton. It seems our reputation for recruiting male mentors precedes us. Personallly I think the more different mentoring programme the better, more publicity will create greater awareness and therefore more people will be stepping up to volunteer. I decided our first expansion project should not start with any local controversy so decided not to set up Big Buddy in Hamilton until much later. It was a pity because we had indentified a pontential coordinator and group of supporters already. I decided to crank up the focus on Wellington, then Christchurch. We have been advertising for a Wellington coordinator, via papers, internet etc and getting a fair number of inquiries, no candidate really stands out yet.

One of our major funders ASB Community Trust commissioned documentaries on their key charities including Big Buddy, we organised for their doco maker to meet with two Big Buddy pairs.

I have have been building some relationship with Banardoes this month. They are very supportive of our work and want to find ways we can work togther. One practical outcome may be our Wellington office will be sited in their new community hub in Taita (lower Hutt), my fellow WOD winner Deborah Morris has been part of this.

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