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January 2007 - Richard Aston

2007 started in late Jan for me and we are already headlong into the first phase of expanding Big Buddy across NZ, starting with Wellington. After a lot of planning work we are currently recruiting for a coordinator in Wellington. I have also been planning a trip to the UK to meet up with similar mentoring organisations over. I'm keen to learn from their experience in taking a programme that works in one city then replicating it nationally. Lots of people say to me, "it's fraught with danger etc, fair enough but I want to know how do we expand our service well without getting speed wobbles. In the UK I have also been asked to present a workshop to their main national mentoring conference in Manchester on May 3. Big Buddy has become very good at recruiting and screening male mentors, something they struggle with over their, so I'm happy to give them a few tips on recruiting men.
As Big Buddy expands I need to be careful not to take my eye of the well established work we are doing in Auckland.
Our two Auckland coordinators will be crucial in this; I'm introducing you to them in this month's diary because you will hear their names again in later months. While I am spearheading our expansion I could not do it with my good mates Steve and Stephen, we work collegially in many areas and they help keep me focused on detail and process. I can have a tendency to wave my arms around in grand gestures, be a little bit too ambitious, so it's a great synergy.

Had an interesting meeting with Opposition Leader John Keys. He was meeting a few leading edge social organisations to help him develop social policy and he asked to meet with us. I told him I'd never voted national but that didn't faze him and to be honest I liked him, he was a very good listener, asked lots of intelligent questions and seemed very authentic. He lost his father at a young age so I guess our work was close to his heart. We had some very interesting conversations on how govt and business could partner together to help fund social work organisation like ours. As we expand out service it will become more and more important to develop a useful relationship with govt but as I said to Mr Keys we are holding out a begging bowl , I'm interested in a serious two way relationship that works for everyone and I think business has a part to play. I had my Vodafone World of Difference award all wall, he made the connection. Will be interesting to see what develops.

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