After more than 30 years of working closely alongside whānau and hapori (communities) in the Wellington region, Wesley Community Action has learnt that with the right support, sustainable responses to complex issues can be driven by hapori themselves.

In 2020, we set up Te Hiko – Centre for Community Innovation to provide more support and add more depth to this important kaupapa.

Canadian thought leaders, Tamarack Institute, describe community innovation as “change, for good, with and within a community”. At Te Hiko we see community innovation as a spark that makes a break from the way things have normally been done – both small or large – and creates a positive impact in surprising and interconnected ways. We believe that community innovation emerges from a specific community and it is shaped by that community’s knowledge and values.

Te Hiko focuses on communities that are excluded from the mainstream, working together to innovate local economic systems that grow wellbeing and the things that really matter to people.

Projects in action include the Wellington Region Fruit and Vege Co-op, which gets cheap healthy kai directly to whānau, cutting out the expensive supermarkets. The Porirua Wealth Pool is a community-based savings pool where members save money together and give – and receive – no-interest loans to avoid high-interest debt. We also provide backbone support to communities who have taken action themselves, like New Zealand P-Pull which supports whānau affected by meth across Aotearoa.

Importantly, Te Hiko aims to support and grow community innovation in action, and also to evaluate, measure and share knowledge about what’s being learned.

The real-life projects Te Hiko supports are important. They’re where hapori want to put their energy, they help build relationships and they provide a chance to play and try things out. Our role as a centre for community innovation pushes us beyond the mahiand into the ako (learning). We believe that learning and sharing is a core part of building new economic systems that actually work for people.

Until now Te Hiko has been operating in a pretty low-key way. Later this year we’ll be raising our profile when we launch a new Te Hiko website. It will host a community innovation library where anyone will be able to access ideas about and examples of community innovation projects in action, as well as the tools and resources they can use to build their own community change.

We hope people will see the projects featured in the library as more than just a constellation of great ideas. We want them to see the bigger picture as well. Our passion is not about the success or number of individual projects, but more about how communities learn and grow their capability to keep meeting their challenges. Our focus is on practising skills, developing new ways of thinking, building networks and uncovering the resources that are needed to support the shift to new economic approaches (and practising how to let go of some of the old ones!).

Te Hiko will be growing and celebrating more and more great initiatives and we’ll also be celebrating the learning that comes from failure. As Te Hiko’s Team Manager and Practice Leader, Makerita Makapelu, points out, we’re OK with mess. “We’re OK with having to speed up or slow down,” she says. “We’re OK with the plan changing, we’re OK with dropping everything and heading off to where we need to be. That’s the reality of working with community, and we practise that every day.”