KEY POINTS:
Four years ago, Ruth Samson recalls, many Maori students at Kaipara College were not "out and out proud about being Maori".
They were not achieving their potential and hid their identity. In a 2000 Education Review Office report on Kaipara College, the 566 students were listed as 80 per cent Pakeha and just 15 per cent Maori.
When the office returned in 2004, the college roll had risen only slightly to 600 but only 72 per cent counted themselves as Pakeha. The percentage of those who proudly stated they were Maori had risen to 27 per cent.
One of the factors in that change was the work Ms Samson and colleagues were doing through state-funded initiatives.
Ms Samson herself has been funded for four years since February 2003 to co-ordinate an Internal Affairs Department community development scheme, based at Kaipara College, to help the local Maori community to become "more self-reliant and resilient".
In the same period the five marae of South Kaipara established Ngati Whatua Nga Rima o Kaipara, a collective trust to identify and work with local tangata whenua. The trust employed first Richard Nahi and lately Cherie Povey as project managers aiming to strengthen the cohesion and governance of the people of the five marae.
Although Cherie Povey has now taken on this role, Mr Nahi is still involved as a Community Action on Youth And Drugs co-ordinator in the area for the Waitemata District Health Board, and as chairman of Kaipara College's Maori community group, Whanau Atawhai.
Together, this group has helped to spark:
* The Whanau Atawhai group itself.
* An annual celebration of achievement by Maori students at Kaipara College.
* The Hikoi Ki Nga Maunga, an expedition in September to climb mounts Tongariro, Ngaruhoe, Ruapehu and Taranaki, and canoe down the Whanganui River.
* An annual sports day for the five local marae.
* Maintaining an older annual kapa haka festival which rotates around the wider Kaipara district.
* A "Hippy" (Home Interaction Programme for Parents and Youngsters) programme helping 80 families with preschool children.
* A scheme that brings years 5 to 7 Maori children from local primary schools to Kaipara College's Whare Ako (Maori department) for four days a year to learn Maori language and culture.
* A mentoring scheme for selected male teenagers in years 10 and 11 at Kaipara College.
* A Maori New Year dinner for elders and an associated exhibition of Ngati Whatua arts, crafts and writing.
* Building repairs and marae development at the five local marae.
The most extraordinary new building is a "whare nikau" begun at the northernmost Puatahi Marae near Warkworth in July.
This was a dream of Te Runanga o Ngati Whatua chairwoman Naida Glavish and aimed at tapping the knowledge, before it was too late, of elders such as septuagenarian Whare Hiku who had helped to build a whare nikau as a child.
Twenty Maori students from Kaipara College and 15 Unitec architecture students led by lecturer Rau Hoskins worked intensively for a week alongside families from Puatahi, gathering the nikau from the forests of Atuanui, preparing them for use and then building the whare.
Other initiatives are just getting under way - a local entry into the growing sport of waka ama (outrigger canoes), for example.
The district, once a flourishing centre of dairying and forestry, has still not recovered from the collapse of forestry and the closure of the Helensville dairy factory in the 1980s.
The recent initiatives have created employment for Ngati Whatua people working with their own people as well as the wider community, but Ruth Samson says this is just the beginning.
"What we have achieved in four years is seed planting," she says. "We need to look at more opportunities for people to make a difference. We need long-term investment here in South Kaipara."
Where the money comes from
* The Internal Affairs Department's Community Development Scheme pays $80,000 a year for three (and sometimes four) years to employ a worker to assist communities in areas of "identified need or limited social cohesion" to "achieve community wellbeing".
* Applications are called for in October each year for specific regions. In 2006-2007 these were: North Shore, Tauranga/Western Bay of Plenty, Rotorua/Taupo, Otaki/Horowhenua and Porirua.
* Other projects supported in the past include a teen parent school and community music studio in Kaiti, Gisborne; Maori youth economic development in Waitakere; the Ka Mau Te Wero community health project in Glen Innes, and a marae upgrading and economic development scheme for Ngati Maniapoto in Waitomo District.
