KEY POINTS:
When trouble breaks out on the streets of South Auckland, Dr John Newman is at the centre of the system that tries to pick up the pieces.
As clinical director of Middlemore Hospital's Centre for Youth Health, he sees the kids who get referred for addictions, mental health issues and simply being in need of care and protection.
He and his staff regularly visit Child, Youth and Family's youth justice facility just around the corner off Roscommon Rd, and see young people in alternative education centres.
Often he sees youngsters who have no effective family. "They don't get on with their parents, or their parents have too many children to pay a lot of attention to the individual kids ... for whatever reason there are some youngsters who need some positive influence outside the family," he says.
In South Auckland, and in the west, where he works at the Waitakere Youth Health Clinic, he sees literally thousands of such kids. And he is doing something about it.
For years, he has gone running with an old mate, Bill Grayson. "I said to Bill: 'If we are going to do something, let's not waste time, let's do something useful,"' Newman says.
"Bill said, 'Tell me what to do.' So we sat down and chewed the fat and came up with the idea of Brothers in Arms."
Brothers in Arms, formed in 2006, is one of a growing number of grassroots initiatives showing voluntary goodwill can sometimes turn around young lives.
Grayson, 62, volunteered to take on Brothers in Arms' first client - a Maori boy from the Chatham Islands who somehow washed up at Newman's clinic, alone in Auckland.
"He said, 'I have this kid. He loves the water, he's grown up on the sea. Can you help?"' says Grayson.
"Well, I do the sea. I'm an ex-lifeguard and I'm into sailing and fishing and diving and stuff. So I stick this kid on the boat and we go and spend some time on the water.
"At the time I had an old mate from the Muriwai Surf Club who was sick and I spent a bit of time up there, so this kid ended up hanging out there with me. We stuck him in a little surf rescue boat, and in a couple of hours this kid was floating around six inches off the sand because he had helped in a surf rescue - done something positive.
"Six weeks later this kid was a trained lifeguard. When he came up for review for diversion from the courts, they gave him diversion and sent him back to his mum in Invercargill. He joined a local surf club and is now an apprentice carpenter."
Grayson, like 47 other people in Brothers in Arms to date, has become a "mentor", which the dictionary says is "an experienced and trusted adviser".
It's a difficult role because the kids involved, however "dysfunctional" their families may be, usually still have mums and dads somewhere.
Verna McFelin of Pillars Inc, which finds mentors for prisoners' children, says mentors must never try to replace the parents.
"It's different from a parent/caregiver role," she says. "It's about a young person having fun with the person and learning new skills."
Brothers in Arms has a Christian base, drawing its name from Jesus saying people would be saved if they cared for those who were hungry, sick, homeless or in prison: "Because you did it to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me."
One of New Zealand's biggest youth mentoring schemes, Te Whanau o Waiparaeira's He Ara Tika (Path of Integrity), was scrapped in the Government's review of "race-based" programmes in 2005. At the time it had mentors for 1074 Maori youngsters.
An official report justifying its closure said an American study found "no evidence that mentoring schemes improved academic achievement, school attendance, school dropout rates, child behaviour (e.g. misconduct) or employment".
Richard Aston of the Henderson-based Big Buddy Mentoring Trust agrees mentoring's record is mixed. He believes some youths are so difficult they need paid, professional mentors working with perhaps half a dozen youths at a time.
"It needs someone with mana - someone who will engage with the kid but won't stand any bullshit," he says. "I have seen highly trained people who can't engage at that level."
But he can quote cases like a highly intellectual, childless mentor who was matched with an almost autistic 9-year-old boy, and at their first meeting said: "Right, I'm going to teach you about the world. Here's your notebook, today we're going to the art gallery."
The boy came back, drew a picture of his mentor and wrote, 'I love you.' The mentor broke down in tears."
A senior lecturer in public policy at Massey University, Dr Grant Duncan, became a "big buddy" to an 11-year-old boy who had been kicked out of school for fighting.
"I was 45 at the time. I have a grown daughter and I thought, 'What's the rest of my life about?"' Duncan says.
At first the boy seriously worried him. "He was talking about people getting stabbed in the neighbourhood, and his cousins doing this, and vicious dogs. It used to disturb me how much he was interested in anything to do with guns and knives.
"I took the view that I won't encourage it and he will gradually get the message that violence isn't going to work around me. If he wanted to do some activity that involved guns, I'd say, 'Let's do something else'.
"But I think, because his mother is so poor and therefore his opportunities are so limited, anything is an opportunity for him - going to the Parnell baths, going to a movie, up the Sky Tower are things he simply wouldn't otherwise do, so pretty much anything is beneficial. It gets him out of the house and out of trouble for a day."
Two years later, Duncan is still the boy's buddy and is unperturbed by the mixed reviews in the academic literature. "I'm operating on my own intuition about what is good for another human being and I actually don't give a tinker's toss about what the research says because I know how inconclusive a lot of that kind of research is," he says.
"It's not just the obvious social outcomes - whether he does well at school and stays out of trouble. The important thing is that, no matter what happens to him, there are people that stick by him. No amount of social research is ever going to be able to prove the benefits of that."
MATT AND DAN
Matt Williams became a mentor for Dan Simpson when Dan had been kicked out of Green Bay High School and was in alternative education at Futures West in Henderson.
Dan's father was jailed for murder three days after Dan was born and has been in jail ever since. Dan's mother, Lorraine Sneddon, says Dan has been in trouble "since he was little".
"I put it down to his genes," she says. "Dan's natural father has a trigger in him which makes him snap when things are not right, he goes from Jekyll to Hyde. Dan has that."
When Matt first met him at Futures West, the director told him Dan had been "throwing desks across the classroom".
Matt, who was at university, says he simply involved 15-year-old Dan in whatever he was doing.
"I'd take him along to my sister's drama production, or we'd go and chuck a frisbee.
"I tried to get him out of his world and expand his horizons a little bit. I just tried to slot him into my daily stuff."
At Matt's 21st birthday party a few months ago, Dan said: "Matt taught me how to think and how to make good decisions. Matt helped me to grow up."
"He got up, and three sentences in, he broke down and started crying," Matt says.
But Dan's life is still in the balance.
Partly because of Matt's influence, Futures West saw enough improvement to get him back into Green Bay High last year, but in November the school suspended him again after eight incidents culminating in him telling a teacher to "f*** off".
He was put into work experience stacking shelves at Repco and was promised that the school would arrange alternative education again for him this year.
But on Thursday, four days after school started, his mother had yet to hear from the school.
Green Bay principal Morag Hutchinson told the Herald later that a meeting would be called in the next few weeks to decide where to place him. Matt is disillusioned with the whole process.
"[Dan's] in limbo," he says.
STEPH AND ROSEMARY
Steph Sisam was 18 and had just started university when she was drawn into being a mentor last year. The St Heliers student was matched with Rosemary Tuaru, then 13, who lived just five minutes away in Glen Innes.
Rosemary's mum is in New Plymouth. Her dad is still in the Cook Islands: "I haven't seen him since I was born."
She came to New Zealand, aged 7, with her grandparents, but her nana has died, leaving her alone with her granddad and a 17-year-old male cousin.
When Rosemary first saw the house where Steph lives with her parents and two sisters, she was amazed. "It has an upstairs," she says.
She first met Steph and a group of other mentors and youngsters on a trip to an island on Bill Grayson's boat. It was the first time she had been to sea.
Her first outing alone with Steph was ice cream and mini-golf at Mission Bay - her first game of mini-golf.
Since then they have been out to the movies, cooked together, dressed up for a party and gone to Steph's youth group.
"I think it's changed my life by hanging out with Steph a lot," Rosemary says. "At school I can concentrate now. When I didn't even know her, I used to be mean to my teachers and talk behind their backs, and now since I'm hanging out with Steph, I'm starting to be kind to them because she's nice and kind."
Making a difference no simple matter
If you have time to make a difference in a young person's life, you won't be let loose without a lot of careful vetting and training.
All youth mentoring agencies require a police check, and both Big Buddy and the prisoners' families support group Pillars say it typically takes three months to get to know prospective mentors well enough to match them with the right youngsters.
Pillars, which has operated in Christchurch for a decade and is just expanding into Auckland, turns down two-thirds of its volunteers.
"Our children are such high-risk children that we need to know the mentors are going to assist them and not harm them," says founder Verna McFelin.
All the agencies try to match mentors and youngsters with common interests, and Richard Aston of Big Buddy says they are "sensitive to cultural and religious issues".
"Generally with Maori, Pakeha and Polynesian, it's not an issue. The biggest cultural issue we have is Indian and Chinese men - no Pakeha woman yet would like a Chinese mentor for her son. We have a Chinese mentor and it took a long time before we finally found a Chinese boy to match him with."
Project K allows the young people themselves to have a say in choosing their mentors, first taking the youngsters, their families and groups of mentors out for the day so they can get to know each other. The other agencies do the matching themselves, and each has a quite distinct role:
* Big Buddy: Seeks male mentors aged 30-plus to become father-figures for fatherless boys aged 7 to 12 and stay with them for at least a year, preferably a lifetime.
* Brothers in Arms: Seeks male and female mentors preferably under 30 who can be friends with a youngster of the same gender aged 10 to 16 for at least a year.
* I Have A Dream: Seeks adult mentors for a small group of Mt Roskill students who have been in the programme since early primary school.
* Mates: Seeks university students to work with year 12 and 13 students - from selected Auckland secondary schools - who have the potential for tertiary study.
* Pillars: Seeks male and female mentors aged 18 or over to work with a prisoner's child of the same gender for at least a year.
* Project K: Seeks adult male and female mentors to meet fortnightly for a year with 14-year-olds who have completed a wilderness experience and a community project.
www.bigbuddy.org.nz
www.brothersinarms.co.nz
www.ihaveadream.org.nz
www.greatpotentials.org.nz/index.php?page=mates
www.pillars.org.nz
www.projectk.org.nz
Other schemes:
www.youthmentoring.org.nz
