Leading from the front issuu

“Pat had taught me that every
small move you make has the
power to influence”.
being and balance with nature) is paramount. Whanaungatanga,
where all people embrace each other through
the wider family relationships, extends to the physical
world such that people respectfully express kaitiakitanga
(guardianship) towards all living and physical things.
For many young people, particularly young people in
indigenous communities, access to valued local places
is often fundamental to building cultural identity (Hayward,
2012). Hayward stated that we all need local places
with which we identify before we can build empathy
with the places of others. A number of other studies have
confirmed that memories of a special place in nature experienced
in their childhood give young people a pool
of calm on which they can draw in difficult times. Pat
knew this in his bones and he found ways to strengthen
such links.
I remember one weekend, when a group of us went
north to Wairoa because it was the ancestral land for
some of the group. Pat lived these ideas and they formed
a central pillar to guide his actions whilst leading the
Napier YMCA. With such a visionary leader as Pat, a
man who took action and who was clearly an activist,
funding was never an issue. If we believed it was important,
Pat said he would find the resources and he did.
He was unlike any other businessman that I had met. He
challenged other leaders in the community to help find
the resources and if they couldn’t he often contributed
his own. I know others of his generation found this challenging
and some were at times disparaging. But this did
not deter Pat.
These early experiences with the Napier YMCA and
Pat shaped my values and how I saw the world. Later, I
endeavoured to put them into action myself. After a period
as a lecturer in Early Childhood Education at the
North Shore Teacher’s College in Auckland, I married
and moved to Rotorua where we lived in a relatively new
community, colloquially known as ‘Nappy Valley’. I was
appointed head teacher at the local kindergarten and
the kindergarten and school were the main/only community
facilities in the newly built housing development.
We were a community mainly of young families, with
Alvin Toffler:
“You’ve got to think
about the big things
while you’re doing the
small things, so that all
the small things go in
the right direction”
about 50% being
Māori and a high
proportion of state
housing. There
were few facilities.
No public transport,
no footpaths, and
many mothers and
children were isolated
while their husbands went to
work in the only car. As I began to
get to know my community and to think about what we
could do to change and improve our place, a group of
us formed a community association and began to walk
door to door to find out what the community needed.
I knew that we needed to think about the ideas that
Pat had driven forward and to struggle and keep going
no matter what. Pat had taught me that every small
move you make has the power to influence. If you hear
someone saying something you do not agree with … do
something, write a letter, a text, an email. Pat has continued
to do this for the last 80 plus years. So we challenged
the policies and priorities of the Rotorua District Council
by political action to firstly provide the community with
footpaths so mothers could walk to the kindergarten,
school or supermarket with their prams or push-chairs.
This initial action established the Aorangi Community
Above: Political action inspired by Pat’s modus operandi eventually helps establish the Aorangi Community Association in Rotorua.
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Napier YMCA transformed and the Downtown Y is born