Waikato Business News April/May 2020

WAIKATO BUSINESS NEWS April/May 2020
‘Here to help u’ is ready to feed and support
An impressive Covid-19 relief effort
is seeing aid being made available to
vulnerable people in Hamilton, linking
business and community.
7
Commercial kitchens at
Claudelands Events
Centre have been humming
despite the lockdown,
with more than 10,000 frozen
meals already prepared, and a
further 12,000 on order, to help
Hamiltonians most in need.
Hamilton City Council and
Montana Food and Events
partnered to support community
groups struggling to
keep up with demand for food
during the lockdown.
Montana is providing the
food at cost, for no profit, and
council is providing the facilities
and support staff free of
charge. Food costs were initially
met by the council and
are now being picked up by
Civil Defence. There is no
charge to those receiving them.
The support is being led by
Wise Group which is co-ordinating
a wider effort - ‘Here to
help u through Covid-19’ - to
provide hardship and social
service support to locals during
Covid-19.
Immediate aid to the vulnerable,
delivered in a way
that builds a stronger society
after the crisis, is the focus of
the relief effort coordinated by
the Waikato’s lead social and
community service providers
and supported by Momentum
Waikato and other major local
funders.
‘Here to help u through
Covid-19’ is a new online
community support tool and
network centered around a
website, www.heretohelpu.
nz, where any member of the
public can quietly ask for help,
and individuals, families, businesses
and organisations can
securely and easily target their
offers of assistance.
It is the ‘front counter’ for
a wide and coordinated support
effort that aims to ensure anyone
suffering hardship during
the Covid-19 lockdown and
beyond can easily request and
get the help they need.
Wise Group and Community
Waikato teamed up to
coordinate and lead the effort,
which involves a range of providers
and funders, including
Volunteering Waikato, Kaivolution,
The Salvation Army,
Trust Waikato and Momentum
Waikato.
‘Here to help u’ has been
launched in Hamilton with
plans to expand across the
Waikato as soon as possible.
The assistance the website
offers includes food parcels,
prepared meals, a collection
service, general local advice
and support, mental health
care, and safe social connections.
Wise Group joint chief
executive Jacqui Graham says
they are committed to doing
whatever it takes to meet the
local community’s need and
to strengthen the wellbeing of
people, whānau and communities.
Community Waikato chief
executive Holly Snape says
many local people are having
to ask for food and other social
support for the first time.
“The Covid-19 crisis has
simply widened the catchment
and range of people who find
themselves in need through
no fault of their own. These
are stories we see all the time,
there are just suddenly many
more of them.
“I hope when we are
through the current crisis that
there is a wider recognition
of this reality and it makes
for a more compassionate
and understanding society
generally. It is time to dispel
the stigma around using food
banks and other support services,
it could be any of us that
land up needing them.”
Snape says the ‘Here to
help u’ project’s first priority
was to restore and reinforce
the routine food supply for the
vulnerable.
“With the lockdown and the
particular susceptibility of the
many older volunteers, existing
services like food banks
lost capacity just when the
demand was spiking.
Figures produced by
Erana Severne, the operations
manager at the Wise Group
Houchen Hub, confirmed
about 70 percent of Hamilton’s
community food support was
out of action or close to it at
the end of March.
Usually more than 735 hot
meals are produced per week,
but at the onset of the lockdown
that dropped to 100,
while the number of food parcels
prepared weekly dropped
from 329 to 89.
The response to this challenge
has seen commercial
kitchens around the city,
including at Claudelands
Events Centre, mobilising to
provide local food aid.
Momentum Waikato’s
involvement has included
funding for the online project,
involvement in the background
research and planning, and
material assistance to Wise
Group at the Houchens Hub in
Glenview.
Severne says the former
Houchen Retreat was in the
process of becoming the Wise
Group’s new Wellness Village,
but swiftly became known
as the ‘Houchens Hub’ as the
virus challenge approached.
“We pivoted to meet Covid-
19,” she says. “Staff here have
been cooking and freezing
meals since mid-March.”
Two chest freezers were
installed early on, so the team
could get ahead of the demand
for food, and the Momentum
Waikato Board also released
funds to CE Kelvyn Eglinton
so he could continue to assist
Wise Group to build their relief
capacity at the edge-of-town
campus.
“It has been great to accelerate
our partnership with Wise
Group at our Houchen facility,”
says Eglinton.
“Our experience with ‘Here
to help u’ is a great example of
meeting the current challenges
head on by seizing the opportunity
to widen and deepen
collaboration across different
sectors, so we all achieve a
greater impact in our collective
mission to create positive permanent
change for our communities.”
From response to restart of the Mighty Waikato
As we slowly start
to emerge from the
shockwaves of the past
few weeks, it’s been good to
hear of a number of businesses
being creative and utilising the
lockdown to create opportunities.
However, the visitor economy
was effectively shut down
overnight, impacting a range of
businesses including tourism
operators, transport providers,
accommodation, hospitality,
retail, conference and event
organisers, venues, caterers
and suppliers.
As this has happened so
fast, the full cost of the impact
is yet to be measured. The only
saving grace is that our industry
is not alone in facing this
threat, as our whole country
has been in shutdown or in a
‘rahui’ for the past few weeks.
We are all hoping that when
Covid-19 has been tackled and
travel restrictions are lifted, a
reinvigorated and more resilient
industry will emerge. We
only need to look to China,
which initially bore the brunt
of the challenges ahead and is
finally starting to see normal
everyday life resume.
Although some of our
tourism family have managed
to carry on in some capacity
during the international travel
restrictions and the current
Alert Level 4 lockdown, we
have continued to see many
of our operators downsize, go
into temporary “hibernation”
and reduce staff numbers.
Some within our hospitality
sector have taken the next
step and reopened with a very
limited service offering at
Alert Level 3. However, for
many in our tourism and event
industry, it’s not until we reach
Alert Levels 2 or 1 before we
can start to consider reopening
again with physical distancing
and contact tracing mechanisms.
Being the one of the first
sectors severely impacted
with Covid-19 has given us a
lead time. This means we now
have the headspace to move
from response phase to begin
conversations on reimagining
and restarting tourism in our
region.
It’s giving us the chance
to pose questions around our
previous visitor arrivals and
expenditure growth, what does
success look like for the future
and how do we move our sector
from a ‘boom and bust’
cycle? It’s now time to inspire,
facilitate collective reflection,
share ideas and help define a
TELLING WAIKATO’S STORY
new Waikato visitor destination,
along with New Zealand
Inc.
We are now starting to turn
our organisation from response
phase into facing the reimagined
future for tourism. We
know that to restart our visitor
industry we will focus on the
“hyper-local” market, before
moving to intra-regional travel
and eventually domestic travel
first from our key drive markets.
The longer term play will
be re-establishing an international
presence.
We should be proud as a
region that in 2016 we adopted
the Tourism Opportunities
Plan based on conversations
to redefine Waikato as a new
visitor destination. We worked
together on prioritising our
five regional game-changers
through to identifying emerging
opportunities for our region
that increased the ‘value’ of
tourism, rather than the ‘volume-based’
model.
This will help inform the
next evolution of our industry
to develop a Destination Management
Plan bringing together
a wider range of stakeholders
to help our communities thrive.
This is also aligned to the aspirations
of our industry’s “Tourism
2025 & Beyond Sustainable
Growth Framework” and
the Government’s “New Zealand-Aotearoa
Government
Tourism Strategy”.
We are under no illusion
that this is not a recovery programme
– it is more a restart
journey which we need to navigate
and pivot for the longterm.
Let the marathon begin.
Through all the darkness
and bleak outlooks, I have been
heartened by stories of innovation,
creativity and kindness
show from our tourism sector.
Together, we will get through
and we will stand stronger than
ever.
Hamilton & Waikato Tourism
is the regional tourism organisation
charged with increasing
international and domestic
leisure and business travellers,
expenditure and stay. The
organisation is funded through
a public/private partnership
and covers the heartland
Waikato areas of Hamilton
City, Matamata-Piako, Otorohanga,
South Waikato,
Waikato, Waipa and Waitomo
Districts. Find out more: www.
waikatonz.com