New central city gig for training café

Air New Zealand has offered a new café space at its Auckland head office to the operators of Flourish, a training café for people with intellectual disabilities.

Flourish opened at Takapuna on Auckland’s North Shore in August last year. It is an initiative of Project Employ and is supported by the IHC Foundation.

Founder Sarah Dann-Hoare says the approach came from the airline, keen to demonstrate its commitment to diversity and inclusion. “Air New Zealand proposed that we open a café in their head office at Fanshawe Street.”

She says Air New Zealand is designing the space from scratch and the café, which will service 600 employees, will be a five-day operation from 7.30am to 3pm on weekdays. The café will employ a barista and café assistants.

The roles of café assistants have been offered to three Project Employ graduates. Damian and Phoebe will work there as paid interns, and Emily, who already has a permanent contract at Flourish Café, will divide her time between the Takapuna and Fanshawe Street cafés. “Once we are set up we can open up the training side of it to people over the bridge.”

In time, trainees will share their time between the Takapuna and city cafés. Sarah says two groups of trainees have now graduated from Flourish.

The first four graduates have found work – three of them are working in other cafés and one is working in retail. Five of those who graduated in July are currently looking for work. Six new trainees started in August.

Project Employ now offers a supported employment service to its trainees. The team works with them during their six-months of training to manage their transition to paid work.

“This is a new decision based on feedback from trainees, their families and local business owners,” Sarah says. “We are evolving based on what is needed, and that is for us to offer our trainees the whole package.”

In the year since Flourish opened, Sarah says the café project has developed. They have recently begun working with training specialist ServiceIQ to do a “hospo-savvy” course covering food safety and customer service. This will have NZQA accreditation.

Flourish is also attracting attention elsewhere in the city. Sarah says the Auckland University of Technology patisserie school asked if one of their students, Danika Jones, could do a two-week placement at Flourish just to observe her and guide her in a new workplace”. In turn, Danika shared her cake-making skills. “It’s really great that the community is using us in this way.” Danika has decided to stay on at Flourish Café as a volunteer baker one day a week.

Sarah says she and her team have been surprised at the difference they have seen in the trainees’ selfconfidence.

“Not only do they now have friends, they are getting to know the customers really well too. Their lives, their worlds, are getting so much bigger.”

Caption: Daniika Jones, Auckland University of Technology patisserie student, and David Spencer, Project Employ trainee, measure the ingredients for some cake-baking.

Coffee parties come with a cool story and a great taste

Tupperware parties have disappeared from the scene in New Zealand, but a newcomer has arrived to be the next cool thing.

Coffee parties are filling the gap, offering specialty single-origin Pluma coffee.

The ethically sourced Pluma coffee, first imported to New Zealand from Mexico by The Lucy Foundation in 2017, is available to Hamilton coffee drinkers at markets and through parties and to everyone else online.

What makes the coffee even more desirable is that people with disabilities are involved at every stage of its production in Mexico and its sale in New Zealand, and they are all paid a living wage.

The Lucy Foundation, the brainchild of Dr Robbie Francis Watene and named ‘Lucy’ after her prosthetic leg, has helped to reinvigorate the production of an heirloom variety of coffee at Pluma Hidalgo, a small mountain community in the south of Oaxaca, Mexico.

“Five core disabled people are paid to hand-process the coffee for the New Zealand market,” Robbie says. They have been part of the operation from the start. “We work with 30 people consistently there.”

But the whole community is involved, and coffee crops have been improved with the use of organic fertilisers, pest control and workshops. Once the coffee harvest is over, the local team runs a café employing the same people.

“They are showing the community what disability leadership is without stating it,” Robbie says.

In New Zealand, two people are employed to run The Lucy Foundation’s Seed Training Programme, to upskill people with intellectual disabilities to work in the coffee industry. “The rest of us are volunteers.” Robbie works as a disability researcher at the Donald Beasley Institute.

“We worked on the smell of an oily rag for many, many years,” she says. “We wanted to show that you could have a whole value chain that was responsive to disability rights.”

Robbie says they now have a proven model and have shown what is possible. “We are in our second year of having sufficient funding for New Zealand operations to deliver our objectives.”

In August, six trainees graduated from the Seed Training Programme, which was granted $40,000 this year by the IHC Foundation, and six more graduates started in September. “We are giving them real hands-on work in a real business. They are paid the living wage for that work. It’s only fair and right that they are compensated fairly for that work. A lot of them haven’t been paid before.”

Robbie says they cannot force employers to think inclusively, but they can demonstrate it.

She says Pluma coffee is a highly rated premium coffee. “We made the decision that we wanted a very good product. We wanted to move away from the charity model.”

Marketing the product and helping to run the Seed Training Programme since November last year is Nicola Rosser. Nicola has a lived experience of disability and has worked in the disability sector. She also runs her own personal coaching business, My Road.

While her colleague Seth Newman works with four trainees in packaging and dispatching the coffee, Nicola works with two trainees on sales.

Nicola says she realised that they needed to do something pretty creative and pretty quickly to sell the coffee and it also had to be something that the trainees would be comfortable doing.

“We have been to schools. We have been to a car yard, some team meetings. For me, the coffee party is learning about the process, about where the coffee comes from.”

Nicola has developed an easy-to-read resource about the coffee process.

“The story and the taste test of coffee draws people in, and we have bags of coffee for people to take away.”

They have a stall at the St Andrew’s Artisan Market once a month on Saturdays and aim to do two coffee parties a month. “The difference between a market and a coffee party is that you have people coming and going and you don’t have time to tell your story.”

The Lucy Foundation has recently received a grant from the Frozen Funds Charitable Trust to allow Nicola to work one-on-one as a job coach for Seed graduates.

While the Lucy Foundation does not pay for fair trade or organics certification for its Pluma coffee, Robbie says they can guarantee its quality and ethical production because they know everyone involved in the process. “We can identify disability leadership at every step of the process.

“It’s definitely the hard path. We have not taken the easy path. What it will look like in the future will be up to the people we work with. The more coffee we sell, the less we will have to rely on charitable funding.”

Caption: The whole community at Pluma Hidalgo is involved in reviving the production of Pluma heirloom coffee with the use of organic fertilisers, pest control and workshops.

IHC boosts support for families in the north

IHC is expanding its Family-Whānau Liaison team in Northland and Auckland to make sure more families caring for people with intellectual disabilities can get the help they are missing out on.

IHC has employed Family Liaisons since 2018 to link families to information and services, local support groups and other families. The team has concentrated on building trust with families and relationships with local support organisations.

But as the number of referrals to the team have grown, the demands have stretched the four staff who cover Northland, Auckland, Horowhenua and Christchurch. And in each area the challenges are unique. In Whāngārei services are limited and overloaded and families struggle to trust and navigate the disability support system. The average age of those being referred is 13. In Auckland, the wide range of ethnicities requires tailored approaches for an older demographic, with an average age of 29.

Frequently the team has to navigate other issues too affecting family wellbeing – poverty, unemployment, rental costs, no transport, the rising cost of living and unforeseen traumatic events in community (COVID, storms, and violence).

A priority for the team is to connect with families who have children who have been newly diagnosed with intellectual disability. But there are many children who are undiagnosed. Often the first step for the liaison team is to support a family to get a diagnosis, which unlocks the funding that provides disability support services.

Family Liaisons hold regular ‘Wellness workshops’ to give family carers a breather.

Two new Family Liaison roles have been created this year to ease some of the pressure in the north – a second team member for Northland, based in Kaikohe, and another one for Auckland, based in the south-east.

Meanwhile, IHC has asked some specialists to measure the impact of our Family-Whānau Liaison work in changing lives. ImpactLab has been talking to IHC Family Liaison Jim Callaghan in Whāngārei about the work he does.

National Fundraising Manager Greg Millar says the cost of the assessment has been covered by IHC donors Glenn and Sonja Hawkins and it is an opportunity to examine the growth and impact of the work.

“It will be looking at the effectiveness of this one position in Whāngārei. It looks at what the potential consequences would be if that Family-Whānau Liaison wasn’t there.

Greg says, for example, it can look at the impact on parents when a child has to be kept home from school.

“What would happen if that family didn’t get a diagnosis for their child and if the child didn’t get the support from the Ministry of Education?” he says.

“These families are often very resilient, but there are critical moments when they need support. It’s about that person – Jim – being there at the right time. It’s not about walking hand in hand with that family for the rest of their lives. It’s about helping that family find their own solutions.”

Greg says ImpactLab will look at the social value of the investment in the liaison’s work. “For every dollar invested, this is the potential return.”

The Family Liaisons are funded by the IHC Foundation and by Foundation North.

Caption: A group of Whāngārei mothers and carers recently met Whāngārei MP Dr Emily Henderson to discuss the pressure on disability services in the north. (From left) Cassy George, Hope Bucknell, Tareen Ellis, Kristy Kewene, Jim Callaghan, Emily Henderson (MP for Whāngārei), Trudy Paul and Kerri Angus.

Tom puts out the call for a café stop

Tom Russell has just finished a day’s work at the Te Tuhi Training Café in Pakuranga, working at the till, taking orders and baking a batch of almond friands.

He loves it. He loves it so much he wants other people with disabilities to come to the café and ask him or the trainers about whether it’s something they would like to do “because it’s a very good opportunity”.

Two years ago, Tom lost his job at Altus Enterprises in Auckland when the lockdowns did away with the need to refurbish Air New Zealand’s headphones. He had worked there for five years.

It turned out the pandemic provided the opportunity for Pakuranga’s contemporary art gallery Te Tuhi, Rescare Homes Trust and the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology to do something they had all been wanting to do – start a training café for people with intellectual disabilities.

Te Tuhi Executive Director Hiraani Himona says training cafés work well overseas but have been slow to take off in New Zealand. Te Tuhi launched at the worst possible time with repeated closures and low customer traffic to the gallery. But she is positive about the project. “It’s been a joy,” she says. “It’s hard, but this is what an art gallery should be doing. It’s filled our foyer space with activity and life and joy.”

She thinks many Aucklanders might see Pakuranga as being too far to go for coffee but, like Tom, she would love to see more of them in the café. The café is not making money and relying on grants and other funding to pay the staff – a cook and a barista – and the trainees. Te Tuhi received a recent grant from the IHC Foundation.

“I would love some more customers. We are 20 minutes by car [from central Auckland] and there is loads of parking.” The café is open six days a week from 9am to 2pm.

Each partner plays a specific role. Rescare selects and oversees the trainees and covers pastoral care. Te Tuhi runs the café and employs the trainers and trainees. The university’s School of Psychology staff have developed the training manual and troubleshoot where necessary, working out how to adapt training if someone is having trouble.

Dr Katrina Phillips, senior lecturer in the School of Psychology, says the project, Nga Mātauranga ōu Mahi, provides benefits all round – for the trainees, the community and for the university students involved in developing and studying the project.

“We used the idea or term ako – that idea of learning from each other. It’s the idea that everyone has something to give,” Katrina says.

Tom was one of the first trainees when the café opened in July 2020. He’s been working there ever since. He does some baking but prefers the customer-facing roles.

“I am more confident, absolutely. I like the customers to feel good about what we do.”

Today was the second time he had made almond friands. “It took a while to remember how to do it again,” Tom says.

He’s comfortable on the till. “I am really good at my counting and maths.”

His skills have led to other work too. Tom is employed at the Better Way container café at Drury on Fridays.

He says he is thinking about long-term goals now – perhaps trying some other kind of employment and a future with his girlfriend. “I really want to be living independently with my partner. That is my long-term plan. She is my blessing and my heart.”

Photo caption: Rachel Martin and Falefatu Carreras are building their skills at Te Tuhi. Rachel is aiming to be a barista.