24/01/2026
You all know we have been very quiet for the past few months. As 2025 drew to a close, the fatigue everybody was experiencing was extreme.
As we turned the corner into 2026 it became an opportunity to reflect on the past five years to this point. So I thought I would share. It’s a long one, I hope its also an interesting one.
Mostly due to the fact that as a not for profit and charitable organisation all our funding and government contracts supporting the work we have always done in the disability sector was put on hold as Covid-19 took effect in 2020. Rightly so. It also gave us the opportunity to work differently as we supported thousands of people across Murihiku to be safe.
Our teaching programme was not Essential Services and we knew that. The work we were doing was about enhancing and creating opportunties for learning life skills, numeracy and literacy skills and interpersonal skills which take people living with multiple challenges from the lounge-chair to independence, autonomy and should they wish it - to employment. Access to schools ceased as we all lived through the disruption of lockdowns, closures and changes. As we came out of lockdown, we again sought support to re-create our teaching programme, and to do this we partnered with another national disability support network. We have over the years co-created tremendous resources, but in the post covid period it required a different form of delivery.
Alongside of all of this we understood that within the community, everybody was doing it tough, and the opportunities for mainstream employment for people graduating from our teaching programme were remote. From our perspective - that is not fair, but as a business owner I get it. People were losing their jobs across the country. Why would people with disabilities expect anything else in an equitable environment? But unwilling to accept that the people we cared about would be heading back to the lounge-chair after everything they had achieved, we established an enterprise business. A Social Enterprise, for which there is actually no formal recognition within our current system. It is a for-profit business, but some or all of the profits being channelled into charitable work. It is treated exactly the same as any other business, there are no special benefits, but it enabled us to provide the employment opportunities for our graduates. Typically they were employed for up to 20 hours per week, and also for as long as we could sustain it – our starting wages rate was not minimum wage, nor was it average wage rates. We chose to pay Living Wage Rates to all employees. Almost 50% of our staff were people with disabilities, as we have always sought to live our values.
In 2023, prior to the election we had the opportunity to seek government support through Whaikaha, and through MSD, to again support our mahi with contracts to deliver our programmes, but as the year progressed and we saw a change of government all contracts for work such as ours were cancelled abruptly.
As we know, with the new government, there were a lot of changes which happened very quickly in the disability sector. Changes which left families reeling and disability organisations stunned and confused about how to move forward. For Koha Kai, we still had the safety and support – although much more limited – of Whānau Ora – through our relationship with Te Putahitanga o Te Waipounamu. They were aware that we were prioritising our Whanau Ora Navigator funds to supporting our most vulnerable. People with disabilities and also by that time nearly half the people we were working with were seniors who were also struggling.
Then in 2024 we learned that Whānau Ora was also to change, and the work we were doing would no longer fit the government directives within the new National Government’s Whānau Ora framework. Te Putahitanga was disestablished and that final bastion of support for the work we were doing was gone.
So more staff lost their jobs and our teaching programme was placed into stasis. For now!!!
But we know that this time of challenge has to end. There needs to be equity in our community. It is only through caring for our people, supporting their improved health outcomes, creating opportunities that will encourage job growth and aspiring to have every New Zealander with a roof over their heads.
In the meantime, we focus on supporting our Enterprise. Feeding the wider community with Tīmata (app.timata.nz) affordable meals which we send NZ wide. We continue to support seniors, disabled people and farmers with our Community meals from our base at 25 Gala Street. Supporting Gore Hospital to feed patients daily and other vulnerable people in their homes through Meals on Wheels – a service we have now also been providing for at least two years to Tuatapere in collaboration with Tui Base Camp Café where our meals are heated and distributed to that community.
We have always known that financial support for Charities is at best unpredictable, and often subject to the whims of whoever sits in government at any time. We know that for long term sustainability, we must find a way to generate the income we need ourselves. We need to be resilient and determined until, with luck, those government priorities become more focused on the wellbeing of our own people.
We want to thank you for all your support through 2025 and for the eleven years before that since we started down this pathway in 2014. ,2026 is going to be a very interesting year.
