What's a recent challenge you've faced? How did you overcome it?

The Team from Auckland Humanity Project

Jim | Ōtara

"I had quite a traumatic childhood. My sister drowned in the Whanganui River at five or six, and I wasn’t there to help her. A little while after, my father was killed in a motorbike accident. My mother followed within a year. I was barely a teenager. My mother died of stomach cancer, a horrible and painful death.

Then, we were in the hands of the Public Trust. Fortunately, as it turned out for me and my brother, I loved school. I stayed until the seventh form in the college house in Purnell Street. I became the head boy of the place, and ran it, when I’m looking back, as a dictator.

I started the network in Ōtara. It morphed into an action group, and it’s morphed again into a group of seven trustees of which I have been elected recently, quite recently to Chairman. To get the job, I guess you have to put in an apprenticeship, in my case of 25 years.

I think Ōtara community is the best community in Auckland. Certainly one of the best in New Zealand. I think nobody really appreciates Ōtara. The reason for that is they’re scared of the place. They don’t know it as I do. If they did, they would celebrate its diversity, its richness and its benefit to the wider community in New Zealand."

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