Top-down approaches to community development are so very 20th-century. But how is it going, putting communities in the driver's seat?
Bruce Munro takes a look at Teviot Valley and a couple of older Otago community development schemes.
Margaret Lory is folding newsletters with an easy precision born of many years' experience. Even so, with 18 years' newsletter duty under her belt, she is still a relative newbie.
Mrs Lory was 60 when she and her late husband shifted from Dunedin to her daughter's and son-in-law's farm, next to Roxdale Foods, 4km north of Roxburgh, in the Teviot Valley.
It was not long before new-found friends asked her along to a newsletter-folding session.
"So, you do. And before you know it you're signed up and away you go,'' Mrs Lory says.
A score of mostly older folk are on the monthly roster, a few called in each week to sit around a table at the Roxburgh Service Centre, to chat and fold almost 1200 copies of the community news sheet.
The newsletters are then distributed throughout the length of this ribbon valley that stretches 48km from the grass and gorse of Raes Junction in the south to the lupin and schist of Shingle Creek north of the Roxburgh dam.
Teviot Valley has a temperate climate and free-draining, productive land that is dissected head-to-toe by the mighty Clutha River and hemmed in by rocky, high country hills beneath a big sky.
Guarding Central Otago's southern gateway, the valley was the heart of the 1860s Otago goldrush, became home to the southern hemisphere's largest woolshed and is the source of delicious, world-class pipfruit and stonefruit.
Gathered in the valley's settlements - Roxburgh, Lake Roxburgh Village, Ettrick, Millers Flat - and scattered across its orchards and farms are 1500 people, a distinct and distinctive community. A third of Teviot Valley's populace collects superannuation, more than twice the national average.
The percentage of its residents who are married and have never separated is a third higher than the rest of the country.
Each summer, the population doubles as hundreds of mostly young people from Europe and Asia, and men from Vanuatu, converge on the valley to pick and pack fruit, while domestic visitors fill camping grounds and pull back holiday home curtains.
More than a quarter of Teviot Valley locals in employment do not have to go out the front gate to be at work, three times higher than nationally.
Here, unemployment is an unimaginable 1%, compared with 4.5% for the whole country.
"There are very strong social networks,'' Mrs Lory says. "Everybody supports everyone else. If anything happens, like when my husband took ill, they can't do enough for you. They're marvellous.''
Despite that heartfelt endorsement, Teviot Valley is one of a growing number of communities throughout the country being funded by the Government to tackle its own problems.
Since 2011, the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) has been experimenting with a ground-up, rather than a top-down, approach to addressing social issues.
What was once called the Community Development Scheme (CDS), is now almost a year into its 2.0 version, which has been tweaked and relabeled the Community-Led Development Programme (CLDP).
Sixteen CLDP communities are each getting a share of $4.56 million a year, for up to five years. But while they are just getting going, a handful of CDS projects, including the one in Teviot Valley, still have a year or so to go. Others, such as the Northeast Valley Project and the Brockville CDS, have run their course.
Telling communities what their problems are and bringing in people to fix them is considered an ineffectual thing of the past. So how is it going, putting communities in the driver's seat? And what happens when the money runs out?
Three of those responsible for getting the Teviot Valley community development scheme off the ground, and trying to keep it aloft, are gathered around a board table in a back room of the all-purpose Roxburgh Service Centre.
Paula Penno, who is the community development manager at the Central Otago District Council, says Teviot Valley's application to become a DIA-funded community development scheme was lodged in 2015.
"There was a bit of thinking and work that went into that,'' Penno says.
WHAT they got for their trouble was $240,000 spread over three years and monthly meetings with a DIA adviser.
The money is being used to employ Jennie Clarke 20 hours a week as the project's community development officer. Some has also been spent on getting advice and running surveys.
"It wasn't a contestable fund,'' Clarke explains.
"A community group couldn't come and say `we want $10,000 to run this event'. It was about having people to make things happen.''
Those "things'' were driven by a desire to ensure Teviot Valley, which had an ageing and declining population, would have a long-term future.
One goal is meeting the needs of overseas workers, so enough workers keep coming back.
Others are: supporting and developing events for locals and visitors, helping businesses capitalise on opportunities and strengthening the community's sense of identity through heritage values and stories.
One of the objectives overlaps with all the others, Stephen Jeffery says.
"That the people of Teviot Valley should have access to faster broadband and the digital skills to make the most of it,'' he says.
Jeffery, who is chairman of the Teviot Valley CDS, was one of the local orchardists who bought out smaller operations about 20 years ago. He himself sold up a year ago.
He is hot on the topic of digital technology. "We've had s*** broadband,'' Jeffery says.
"When you think about the productivity that comes out of this valley, and that's export dollars all of that, we are very poorly serviced. In my mind, it is almost disgraceful.''
The government plan to roll out broadband in Roxburgh in 2022 is simply not good enough, he says.
"We should be connected. It's what we should expect. This is not a Third World country. There's a lot of Third World countries I've visited that are way ahead of us on this, way ahead.''
Fast internet widely available in the valley and the skills to wrangle it would be a big win for several of the other community-building goals, he says.
For instance, the project governance board thought welcome packs for overseas workers might be a great idea. But when the workers were surveyed, it became apparent that what was most needed was a daily email to employers detailing local activities and events workers could take part in, and fast wireless internet at their lodgings so work-weary orchard hands could communicate with distant family and be entertained after-hours.
Fibre broadband would also give businesses opportunities to make the most of the Clutha Gold and Roxburgh Gorge cycle trails.
Jeffery has made it possible for many in the valley's townships to access a subscription-based internet service feeding off one of the school's ultrafast fibre cables.
But he will not be happy until each house tucked behind the fold of every hill in the valley has access to the same speeds gigatown Dunedin enjoys.
He is talking with two providers about getting fibre into the valley.
"We want the Rolls Royce standard, to future-proof what we do,'' he says.
Teviot Valley's CDS runs for another year. While the funding is there, the going can be good. But what happens next?
The Northeast Valley community development scheme, in Dunedin, has been finding out what a challenge the next stage can be, but also how generous people and organisations can be.
It is a couple of years since its five years of DIA funding stopped. That included an extra year of money to enable The Valley Project, as it is known, to try to generate its own income stream, Steve O'Connor, a Project executive member says.
The community development scheme "absolutely worked'', he says.
It had grown out of concerns about local schoolchildren being late or sick because of poverty issues and cold, damp housing.
Initiatives have included a home heating project, a "kai share'' programme, a community garden and work space, annual community-wide Matariki celebrations and pest eradication and waterway conservation drives.
The school roll has doubled and Northeast Valley has become a place people want to live, O'Connor says.
The "feel-good factor'' was a byproduct of addressing needs, rather than a goal in itself, he adds.
Maintaining momentum was always going to be a challenge.
"Those years of funding were a small window of opportunity,'' O'Connor says.
"Because we were so reliant on one funder, I was worried.
"But we've done much better than I thought we might.''
The last of the DIA funding enabled the Project to buy a building in Allen St, in the valley. It is leased to the Valley Community Workspace, which supports the development and use of low-carbon and sustainable technologies. The rent helps fund ongoing community-building in Northeast Valley.
Now, through the efforts of Anna Parker, the Project's retiring community development co-co-ordinator, money is also coming from Otago funding organisations.
That is nothing to be ashamed of, Megan Courtney says.
Nelson-based Courtney is national manager of Inspiring Communities, an independent organisation fostering community-led initiatives in New Zealand.
The DIA is an important funder, but is only one among many ways of financing community-led activities in New Zealand, she says.
"Everyone has a stake in ensuring we have healthy communities,'' Courtney says.
"It has to be about whole ecosystems working together. So, everyone's got something to contribute.''
Northeast Valley might be feeling quite buoyed by its community-led experience. The same cannot be said of one of New Zealand's first government-funded community development schemes.
Hopes were high, but so too were fears, when, in July, 2012, the Otago Daily Times spoke to members of the Brockville Community Development Project.
Community dinners were attracting dozens of people. Life-skills and parenting sessions were being run. There was after-school homework support, ground was about to be broken for a community garden and a home insulation scheme was being scoped.
But a year later, the hoped-for five years of funding was cut at the end of the third year.
Collaborative activities ground to a halt, says Marie Laufiso, who was the Brockville project's co-ordinator and is now a Dunedin City councillor.
"We each went back to our discrete parts,'' Laufiso says.
"The Brockville Community Support Trust did make some attempts to carry on. But because of the loss of people ... it is not doing anything in a structured way. There's just pockets of voluntary work.''
In 2012, Andrew Scott, who was minister of the Brockville Community Church and one of the driving forces in the community development scheme, was dreaming big but also worried for his neighbourhood that ranked 8 out of 10 on the national deprivation index.
"I believe communities like Brockville will be increasingly left to their own ... to look after ourselves and the people in our community,'' Scott said.
It was and is a reasonable fear, Courtney says.
"I do have concerns that communities that could benefit the most aren't getting the attention they need,'' she says.
"Community-led development isn't one-size-fits-all. There shouldn't be a privilege for those who have capacity to do this work. Everyone can do it, but some might require some different funding, some different timeframes, some different investment principles.''
Courtney says she has raised the issue with DIA and other funders.
"We have done and we will continue to, because we believe it is really important.''
Back in Teviot, with a bone-chilling wind inclining thoughts towards the Jimmy's pie shop only 100m away, Penno says they are well aware of potential pitfalls.
"We didn't want to create something that would put a shot in the arm of the community and then, when the money stopped, things would fall over,'' she says.
Clarke agrees. "We are looking for partnership opportunities, or already existing organisations, so that when the scheme is no longer doing what it's doing, things will tick along,'' she adds.
That, they could foresee. But since the scheme started, the ground has shifted beneath their feet.
It is one of the strengths of the community-led approach that, because the locals are in control and the strings attached to funding are few, they are able to observe, learn and adapt as they go.
In 2015, when the application was lodged with the DIA, the key concern was how to keep everything going in a valley with a rapidly ageing population that depended on volunteers to maintain services and so the social fabric of the community.
"There's been a bit of an alignment of the stars,'' Penno says.
The two cycle trails, with 94km of track between them, are proving popular, pulling people and dollars into the valley.
Added to that, the real estate boom in the region's main resorts is reaching its inexorable fingers towards Teviot Valley.
"This is a place of outstanding natural beauty that is not overcrowded; that has a true sense of rural New Zealand,'' Clarke says.
"It is very different from a Queenstown or a Wanaka now. It's very special and people like that. It's a driver for people coming here ... People are coming through, looking for that.''
To keep a lid on that, the community's values have to be front and centre, Clarke says.
"Here, it is about community first; looking out for each other, being involved, valuing our landscape.
"They have to be at the forefront of any development; tourism, infrastructure. They shape all we do.''
That is where the Teviot Valley community development scheme's fifth and final goal - supporting the area's heritage values and stories - comes in to its own.
The valley has more than 150 years of colonial settlement history and centuries more of Maori history. But much of it is locked away.
They want to make that widely accessible, so that schoolchildren, newcomers and anyone else with an interest can tap into those stories and the values they reflect.
Yet again, the internet is the key.
The plan is to establish a cloud-based repository of all that information.
It pushes Jeffery's thoughts back to the transformative effect of getting fibre.
"This area could become so sought-after if connectivity allows you to work from home and have a lovely lifestyle,'' he enthuses.
But once the genie is out of the bottle ...
They will have to work hard to stop Teviot Valley losing the very thing that will draw the world to it: comparative isolation which maintains its untrammelled natural beauty and a strong sense of community.
