The day Melissa Atama's children were so scared of the menacing atmosphere at the Clendon Shopping Centre they refused to get out of her car, was the day life began to look up in the south Auckland community.
"They wanted me to lock the doors, they had this fear," she says. "There was rubbish and graffiti everywhere and anti-social behaviour. I thought 'it doesn't have to be like this'; I'd got to the point where I either moved out of the area or did something about it."
Atama chose to do something and today, almost four years later, the mother of four young children oversees a project restoring a sense of pride in the community: "But when we started there was a dark cloud hanging over Clendon," she says. "It was a forgotten place."
Her tireless work - much of it in her own time - has earned her an ASB Good as Gold award, the bank giving her $10,000 to do something for herself, and her family "for a change".
"Everything Melissa has goes back into building and growing Clendon and making it a better place for the community," says ASB Counties/Waikato regional manager Mark Hayward.
"It would have been easy to turn a blind eye and leave things for someone else to fix, but it really speaks to the kind of person Melissa is that she took it upon herself to turn things around and make a difference, not just for her children but for everyone who lives in and around Clendon."
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Following that 2017 visit to the shops Atama rolled up her sleeves establishing the Clendon Pride Project (now operating as The Pride Project Charitable Trust) and, with other volunteers, she began working to beautify the area around the shops.
"We put in gardens, painted murals, did big rubbish clean-ups, ran community events, had night lights installed and organised school holiday pop up programmes," she says.
"It's been a hard and very challenging four years. I spent a lot of time getting various stakeholders together at the beginning to figure out what we could do. I approached many groups including the local community board, marae, youth organisations and anyone who wanted to help.
"I believe children deserve the best possible life - that's what it's all about for me."
Atama, who was born in nearby Manurewa and has lived in the district all her life, believes the project is having a positive effect. "I can see a change in energy around the community, the town centre is now more loved, it is cleaner, tidier - and yet there is still much more to come."
Already the project has evolved to a point where the focus is also on advocating and empowering those in the community with high needs - a group of four Hope Navigators being employed to "navigate" people to appropriate support organisations.
Atama was nominated for the ASB award by a friend, Stephanie Nash, who says Atama forgoes a lot of her family time to carry out the community work.
"I have seen her financially suffer but never give up on those around her," Nash says. "She does everything with so much aroha (love) and I would love to be able to surprise her with this gift, so she doesn't need to struggle through when she spends so much time and energy making sure everyone else is okay."
But Atama says she loves what she does despite her busy life. As well as her work with the trust (she is its chairperson and the Hope Navigators team leader) she is raising four children - Bella (13), Bensen (11) and twins Maia and Max (6) - and serves as the deputy chairperson of the Manurewa Local Board.
"Yes, it's a little bit crazy at times and sometimes hard to strike a balance," she says. "But in some ways my work with the trust helps in my position on the board because I'm so entrenched in the community and know what is happening."
It helps too that her husband Watene works as the trust's general manager with responsibility for managing the community house it operates out of, planning events and meeting stakeholders: "It's great us being together in this. I'm so busy I'd probably never see him otherwise."
Atama says she has yet to decide what to do with the $10,000. "We'll take the kids on holiday somewhere; they want to go on a cruise so we might do Australia or Rarotonga."