Melissa
Atama:
Having a Good Human in your Corner.
The one thing you notice first about Melissa Atama when you sit down with her to have a cup of coffee in her office, is the rapid fire pace with which she speaks. Her words are never verbose though, but instead coated with clarity and wisdom, and disguised with a hilarity that makes you stop and exude great belly laughs while that wisdom seeps into you, even though by the time it does, she’s already ten sentences ahead of you. But once you understand that at 37, she has not only created the community grassroots organisation, The Pride Project, but is General Manager of it which involves mentoring and looking after the Hope Navigators she employs and facilitating the diverse kaupapa and expanding initiatives she creates for it, is a board member of the Manurewa Local Board, teaches a Te Reo Māori based Parenting Programme, is a single mum of four, and loves to go dancing and sing karaoke on the side, you begin to understand why this woman may need to speak a little quickly.
But what becomes quickly apparent too, is the safe space she automatically creates for you to share in, in between our two coffee cups and the piles of paper on her desk, just by the warmth and vivacity of her presence. So much so, that before I’ve even asked her a question, I’m already telling her my life story. I know that in her office in the corner of The Pride Project Community House on a suburban street in Clendon, that has become a hub for so many inhabitants of Manurewa, I can tell her anything about myself, and she’ll just understand, because boy, in her line of work she has seen, heard, and carried a lot, for the most vulnerable people in her community.
Melissa began her pioneering and crucial work for The Pride Project six years ago when a key moment spurred her to implement change in the suburb where she was born, bred, attended local schools and raised her own children. The first was prompted by how unsafe her kids felt back then; ‘I was driving through Clendon and my kids all locked their doors. It was that scary for them, they would lock the doors as we drove through the town centre. And I had to make a choice, do I leave [Manurewa] to raise my kids? Which I could’ve done, because I was able to, leave and go and raise my kids somewhere else. Or do I stay and do something about it?’ Rather than take the easy route and shrug responsibility off, Melissa decided to try and implement some change. ‘It was just me, saying, “I want to do some cool stuff in our community. Let’s just see what happens, let’s see if it works.”’
For her, this meant organising a hui with local community stakeholders; the police, the marae, the Clendon Town Centre owners and the general public. By asking and seeing what her community needed first, she started off, working on what she could change by focussing on place-making and holding events. Her first project, was spearheaded by her own response to the environment around her.
‘There was just a lack of love for the space. It was really unloved in terms of the environment. I was also really gutted about how people were treating their children in particular and each other. So the environment was just reinforcing the social [dynamic]. There was a bank opposite the Ministry of Social Development up at Clendon, and it was just full of rubbish and nappies and rats the size of cats running up the trees. People were standing [in line] opposite the MSD, their lives in the hands of the government, feeling really disempowered and disenfranchised. They were looking out to the bank, and the environment was a reflection of them and how they were feeling.’
This was the first place Melissa decided to transform, turning it into a food forest by gathering the local community and performing an activation. Together they cleared out all the rubbish, and planted fruit trees and vegetable gardens, which are still thriving to this day. Once it has ripened, the food then gets harvested and put into pātaka kai, free food hubs around the village. One flowing with fresh fruit and vegetables, and donated tinned goods is at the front of the Community House, which I walk past when I arrive.
After the food forest, other projects followed, with the help of local organisations. Foodstuffs asked her to do a mural on a blank wall on their Pak n’ Save in Clendon, and after that she developed a bilingual annual hikoi throughout Manurewa. She knew these was her chances to ‘flip the script’ and make her community proud of being Māori, and proud of being Māori in Manurewa, by putting the ‘mana back in Manurewa’, because the narrative that had been coming back to her for so long, was that people couldn’t wait to leave ‘this shithole’. It was therefore important for her to create spaces where people could feel a sense of connection, belonging and pride, where they would want to put roots down. It was also important for her to prove to locals, and local organisations, how effective and dynamic these events and spaces could be, because she knew how hard it was to get funding. ‘As a local board member, there’s been a study done and Manurewa is severely undeserved in terms of funding [compared to our] deprivation scale and sheer size.’
Funding has been one of the biggest hurdles Melissa has had to overcome, especially at the beginning when she was starting The Pride Project. ‘It was a $10,000 pilot here, just to see what I could do, and I did a lot of it through love. My own family struggled, because it doesn’t pay, so it was a lot of blood, sweat and tears. That was for years, and I probably nearly burnt out three times during that time.’ What kept the Pride Project going, was opening up the Community House with the help of Clendon Residence Group who held her original seed funding and helped to umbrella her. This enabled her to establish the Whare Tautoko at its entrance, the free secondhand shop. ‘It was one of the first things we did’ says Melissa, ‘It’s basically a giving room. It’s special, it’s the reason why people come, to get some stuff, plug those different needs. It’s a portal.’
It’s at the Whare Tautoko, when I first arrive, that I’m met by the grin of Rhonda, and it’s later in our conversation that Melissa tells me parts of Rhonda’s story.
‘Rhonda came here six years ago, bowled in my door, loud as hell, and said, ‘My bloody housing NZ fence is down, gotta fix that!’ She’s lived in Clendon for over seventeen years and she started volunteering here. She probably sits on the worst trauma of anyone I’ve ever met, in terms of her life story. She has this own lived experience of her trauma, plus she whāngai’s two boys, who also sit on a lot of trauma and abuse. And so, when she started here, I said, “Ok, you can come here and volunteer, but I want to take you on a journey yourself.”’
With Melissa’s help and guidance, Rhonda went through training, parenting programmes and is still going through counselling in order to heal the childhood trauma from her own life. Now the boys she looks after, one who has been diagnosed with high and complex needs which only 1 in 17,000 get diagnosed with because his trauma is so severe, also have wraparound support as facilitated by Melissa. ‘You’ve got to do mahi on yourself first. When you’re all good then you can look outside the walls of your own whare, and then you can look out to your wider kāinga, and then you can look out even further than that. But you can’t give if you’re not ok to give.’
This is the most vital work that The Pride Project does, helping people in the community who are willing to take the path, to heal from their childhood trauma. In Melissa’s experience, this is more often than not, the root cause. ‘It’s not fair, for many adults, of what people would see on the outside as ripping off the system or making bad decisions, or this and that, for the most part in my experience, they were all let down as children. The adults in their life let them down. So they haven’t done that bit of healing which is essential to who they really are.’
This is where Melissa’s Hope Navigators come in; her lived in experience mentors who work one on one with people, who have knocked on the Community House door, or have been referred there. ‘Having our Hope Navigators with lived in experience is what works for our people. They utilise their testimony and their lived experience to connect. That’s the shift for our people to go, “Shit you do know”, because otherwise all they see is a uniform or a lanyard coming down the driveway, and they’re like, “You don’t fucking know how I live.”’
The work the Hope Navigators do, is to really advocate, assist and sit alongside the people that come to them, filling in the gaps that governmental services may leave, and to fulfil the basic needs of those they support first. ‘What I love about the mahi we’re doing, is that we really come in alongside our people and get to know them as a person’ says Melissa. ‘So it’s all about manākitanga, whakawhanaungatanga, getting to know who they are, what their story is, how they got there, what the most urgent and pressing issues are and just starting to unwrap that onion. We need to get to that core, but we also need to plug their basic needs first, because you need to eat, and the power needs to be on, your kids need to go to school, and ok, they’re not going to school because they’ve got no uniform and no school bag. Then eventually when we’re at a point, because all those things are in place, we’re able to now stop and actually look at what happened. How did this get to this point? It’s super complex, once you start peeling back all those layers. Then we do the mahi that is needed which we do with professionals.’ Melissa’s Hope Navigators hold a space of hope, until their people are able to do it for themselves. ‘It’s just about having a good human in your corner’, she says.
It’s a model that works, because these are long-term strategies based on empowering people, it’s about the ‘hand up’ not the ‘hand out’. And it works not only for the people who are being mentored, but for the mentors too. ‘That’s the thing [all the Hope Navigators] say, ‘This work helps me heal.” We’re all still healing, I’m still healing. This work is a really reciprocal cycle, and they get pumped to know they’re making a difference in people’s lives.’
Melissa begins to shed a few tears (as do I) when she begins to tell me how much Rhonda’s life has changed since working with her and her volunteering at The Pride Project. ‘She was in tonnes of debt but now she’s just been able to buy herself a new car. Her life has just gone from strength to strength and she never thought she’d live a life like this. Because anyone who knows her and where she came from, as a three year old, and what she went through at that age, the trajectory of her life was always probably going to go into this direction. And it did, but it came full circle, and [now she] lives the life she deserves.’
The Pride Project’s strength as an organisation, lies in finding out and knowing not only what each individual needs, but also what the community as a whole needs. Over the pandemic the community’s needs changed, there was a spike in referrals, overcrowding in homes, and more harm and poverty due to the compounding situation. The Pride Project’s COVID response meant that when most other local organisations packed up, they became an essential service, creating a food bank, handing out hygiene packs with masks and hand sanitiser, performing routine well-being checks and educating the community on the virus, alongside their usual work. ‘People were scared, just not having that information a lot of the time. Even, just in general, they don’t know their rights, or they don’t know how to navigate spaces, and to be informed.’
For the general public to help out with the Pride Project, Melissa advises people to find out what they want to and can do; to donate money via their give-a-little page, leave clothing or warm blankets at their Whare Tautoko or food at their pātaka kai, or to volunteer by helping out at events or by sharing a skill. ‘We help run a free community sports project once a week, and we have this huge amount of tamariki and rangatahi coming. They’re hungry, and they don’t necessarily want to go home, they’re from some pretty challenging backgrounds. These kids need good role models in their lives, and they just don’t have the right tools. If people have a skillset that they want to share, they are more than welcome in the community.’ It’s a welcoming I’ve witnessed first hand.
Before I hug Melissa goodbye, I ask her what she’s been the most proud of with The Pride Project. ‘I’m most proud of our people, my team,’ she says. Our people that have grown so much and done that healing journey, which is not an easy thing to do, because it means you have to go back. And now they’re helping so many people. I’m really proud that I can employ them, and they’ve also come off benefits. That’s a trajectory shift, that’s an intergenerational shift to impact someone’s life for them to then on give, I’m really proud of that. And then I’m really proud of Manurewa.’
As I leave, walking through the Whare Tautoko, I don’t see Rhonda to say goodbye to, but once I get outside, I see she’s busy parking her brand new car. I give her a wave goodbye, but she’s too busy enjoying it to notice.