Charity starts close to home for courier boss

Danielle Bergin, founder of Island Child Charitable Trust, provides emergency housing for homeless people and Steve Bonnici CEO of Urgent Couriers. Photo / Richard Robinson.

Why would a self-made Remuera businessman be interested in a homeless shelter run by a solo mum in Glen Innes?

If you're Steve Bonnici, owner of Urgent Couriers, the answer is because they both live in the same community - and he's worried about where it's heading.

"What's gone wrong in the generations that have brought about the normalisation of the level of violence that we see in society today?" he asks.

"Businesses have a stake in the social fabric because we are employers and we are part of communities, and part of our licence to operate is to ensure that they are prosperous. If they are not, you can't build bigger walls."

Bonnici, who founded Urgent Couriers aged 24 in 1989 and has built it to second or third place in the Auckland market as "New Zealand's only carbon-neutral courier service", was a natural for deputy chairman of the Business Council for Sustainable Development.

But he worried the council was too focused on the environment while another key component - society - was disintegrating.

"Two or three years ago I raised it at an executive meeting after another horrific case of kids killed by their parents. I said we need to do more work in this social space," he says.

Urgent Couriers used to sponsor surf lifesaving but when another courier firm gave the lifesavers a fatter cheque, Bonnici began supporting the Auckland City Mission.

"The City Mission was running a fleet of vehicles to pick up stuff," he says. "If we had vans in the area, we could do that at marginal cost to us and save them quite a lot. And we could leverage our relationships with our clients, saying, 'How about getting up a collection for them'."

Then he realised that the mission was just one of thousands of charities that needed help. "So I said to the team, how about we just do it for what it costs us to pay the courier, then we can offer it to anyone who can prove to us they are a charitable organisation."

So when Danielle Bergin of Glen Innes's Island Child homeless shelter started using Urgent Couriers, she was surprised when the company offered her its charitable rate.

Bergin depends totally on charity. Once homeless herself, she almost died in childbirth. She saw a TV programme on a doctor struggling with such crises in Vanuatu and started organising mothers' groups to send medical equipment to him.

She used a small legacy from her father to open an opp shop in Panmure to raise money for the medical equipment. Then people started bringing homeless families to the shop and she realised she was needed closer to home.

"The first case was a mother and her 12-year-old son living in the Westfield shopping mall," she says.

Today she still sends supplies to Vanuatu, but has closed the opp shop and opened a homeless shelter - a tiny unit in Pt England Rd and three one-room chalets crammed on to the back yard. Homeless people are referred from all over Auckland because there is nowhere else for families - the inner-city night shelter caters only for men, and women's refuges won't take men or older sons.

Her charity has some amazing volunteers but no paid staff and Bergin lives on a sole parent benefit. She calls her shelter a "healing centre" because most people who come there have been traumatised. She aims to "stabilise" them, help them tackle any addictions and get back a life worth living.

She raises money wherever she can get it, much of it from pokie trusts.

"I have no guilt about getting gambling money because gamblers become homeless," she says. "Food is the hardest, no one funds food."

Bonnici wants to draw in other businesses he works with who could provide food and other supplies. But he feels frustrated and wants to help "more systematically".

"When you look at the City Mission and Lifewise and what Danielle is doing, they are all playing in the same sandpit... they all have their back offices and the continual round of seeking funds taking up their time," he says.

"These organisations don't know who to ask and don't have the networks. The organisations wanting to support them don't know what they need or how to get into contact with them.

"If there is a known conduit for those conversations to happen, it makes it easier for both parties."

www.islandchild.org.nz