December 02, 2013
MUMA on a mission with food bank
Auckland’s city missioner says opening a food bank at south Auckland’s Nga Whare Waatea Marae is a way of giving people access to a wider range of services.
The foodbank opens at 11 tomorrow under the management of the Manukau Urban Maori Authority.
Diana Robertson says it's a pilot for a new way the City Mission can partner with groups already working in the community.
She says over the past year the mission has talked to 100 of the families it supports to better understand the issues of living in poverty, and it discovered some of them dealt with up to 40 agencies.
"And we decided we were more part of a problem than we were part of a solution, that we didn’t want to be part of a standalone food bank, we didn’t want to make families come and tell their stories yet again, we wanted actually to make sure there were a whole lot of other integrated services wrapped around families," she says.
The City Mission supports almost all of Auckland’s 70 or so food banks.
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