New Whanganui City Mission manager traded in academic career to help others

Whanganui City Mission manager Dr Anthony Nobbs has worked in the role for three months. Photo / Bevan Conley

Whanganui’s new City Mission manager Dr Antony Nobbs says he’s been searching for a job that will make a tangible difference for people.

For the past 13 years, Nobbs has worked as a director of learning support and student development at Massey University and Auckland University of Technology.

But he said universities were now being run by businesspeople rather than educationalists.

“With big institutions, it’s easy to talk about your values and much harder to live them.”

He said he’d observed that a lot of the values universities upheld were box-ticking exercises.

“The tertiary situation is quite disappointing now. Academic education and universities used to be about creating critically-thinking citizens, but it’s very much a business now.

“It’s about getting people through education as quickly as possible.”

He’s been manager of Whanganui City Mission for three months now.

“I love Whanganui, it’s a great city, and one thing I’ve noticed is how generous people are.

“I wanted a change and I wanted to be working at the coalface. With education, you make a difference through changing people’s attitudes and horizons; here, you make a difference because you’re feeding people.”

Before his academic career, Nobbs worked in South Africa in the townships with an aid organisation called African Enterprise.

“It’s nice to come back to the social justice space and the stuff that really makes a difference for people.”

He said he’d noticed how siloed and competitive food charity groups were in Whanganui.

“There’s a real shortage of funding and available food, and a lot of people wanting to do good things.

“We’re working really hard at the moment with a lot of the food groups to get a joint food security vision for Whanganui.”

He said the City Mission’s role as a provider of emergency food meant it operated at the bottom of the cliff.

Nobbs would like to see smoother processes for transitioning people on to better life pathways.

“For instance, we recently received a lot of carrots and parsnips from kind farmers, but a lot of our community don’t have power or, if they do, they aren’t used to cooking vegetables.

“[Members of ] our community often haven’t been taught to cook well.”

He said the City Mission’s food parcels also needed to be more nutritionally valuable.

Issues that were intertwined with food security, such as mental health, addiction and adequate housing, needed to be addressed by the City Mission’s collaborative work with other organisations, he said.

Nobbs recently met with Whanganui District Council to discuss affordable housing options.

“A lot of people we see are living down by the river in tents or amongst bamboo.

“Some of our landlords would rather have empty houses than [beneficiaries] in their houses.”

Volunteers at the City Mission were often retirees and it needed more younger volunteers, he said.

“The understanding that we have responsibilities to the rest of our community is a generational thing, and that needs to be passed on.”

Eva de Jong is a reporter for the Whanganui Chronicle covering health stories and general news. She began as a reporter in 2023.