Nā tou rourou nā tōku rourou ka ora ai te iwi: with your food basket and my food basket, the people shall live on.
A partnership between local iwi Ngāti Kahungunu and the Migrant Welfare Group has brought this traditional whakataukī (Māori proverb) to life for the Hawke's Bay's migrant communities, says Multicultural Association Hawke's Bay president, Sukhdeep Singh.
For the past five weeks Sukhdeep has been wearing a new hat, working with the Migrant Welfare Group, part of the Hawke's Bay Civil Defence Emergency Management Group's
"network of networks" – a group of community organisations and agencies responding to Covid-19.
The Migrant Welfare Group is made up of the Office of Ethnic Communities (OEC) local advisor Rizwaana Latiff and the Hawke's Bay Multicultural Association.
OEC has been involved in a pilot project identifying resilience factors in communities, well before Covid-19. The model is based on a "hub" with "community champions" and aims to disseminate information to each community group. The champions then feedback to "base", who in turn refers to the appropriate agency and offers support. The champions are supported to build capacity in the community during the recovery period as well, Sukhdeep says.
"It became apparent by the second week of the national lockdown, that many migrant families needed more support and help.
"We knew right from the beginning of this response that migrant communities could be some of hardest hit, needing support due to language barriers, lack of awareness of the support available, and facing financial hardship."
Sukhdeep says they needed a way to give diverse multicultural communities advice and information, as well as provide ethnically appropriate food parcels to those who needed welfare support.