Hekenga Mauriora Trust
Rangatahi and Community Development

An innovative approach

Shaun Maynard

hmt@hmt.org.nz

Background

Hekenga Mauriora Trust was established as a part of the Mental Health Strategy, Kia Tu Kia Puawai to deliver a mental health project to Rangatahi aged 13-25 in the Te Tairawhiti Rohe.

Strategic Goal

In the year 2006, Rangatahi will be better equipped to take advantage of emerging job opportunities within the Information Technology arena, pursue their aspirations and be more receptive to the ever-changing global environment.

Key Issues

• Rangatahi Development.
• Rangatahi Capacity Building.
• Priorities for Rangatahi in their communities.

Key Strategies

• Technology, Education and Training.
• Mana Tangata.
• Mana Rangatahi.
• Whanaungatanga.

Development Priorities

• Direct Rangatahi Development.
• Technology, Education and Training.
• Improve levels of Iwi education.
• Finding innovative ways of expanding opportunities for rangatahi in the economic and social life of their communities.
• Improving social services leading to outcomes that are rangatahi sensitive.
• Strengthening existing pathways for rangatahi.

Project Objectives

Technology, education and training

• To use media and information technologies for access to communication resources.

Mana Tangata

• Provide support, to develop whanau based solutions and rangatahi-driven initiatives that will help to create the enabling social and economic environments to build and strengthen communities.

Mana Rangatahi

• To look, support and develop opportunities where rangatahi are working to leverage and multiply site assets through developing strategies that will enhance and expand their capacity to sustain their efforts long term.

Whanaungatanga

• To promote and encourage social, cultural and recreational members for whanau community to strengthen and sustain whanaungatanga.

Hekenga Mauriora Trust I.T. Deployment and Strategy

Main Objective

• Bridging the Digital Divide for Rangatahi in Te Tairawhiti district in a safe environment.

Sites in Te Tairawhiti rohe.

At Hekenga Mauriora we have eight sites distributed over the East coast in. Most of these sites are distributed in rural areas. The Tairawhiti Rohe covers a huge expanse with around 55,000 people living there, of this an estimated 45% are Maori with little or no access to IT at home.

Spanning 200Km’s North to south and 25KM’s East to west. Much of the areas encompassed have not had any major upgrades to Telecommunications structure within the last 10 years.

Our sites are scattered over an area (*Read the note then*) these upgrades brought the Tairawhiti network up to a certain standard but since then there have been major advances within the ICT field that just cannot be adequately supported by the existing network within Te Tairawhiti.

Envisaged goals of the HMT Network

From an IT perspective the goals of HMT are described as:

• Access to newer Technology.
• Easy maintenance.
• Safe content web browsing and chat abilities.
• Efficient utilisation of older government supplied PCs

To this end the sites were carefully designed around these goals.

Proposed solution

Each site is standard and comparable to each other with the notable exception of Te Karaka and Tolaga bay in which a server unit was placed. Within each site is a local area network that has various equipment to allow a plethora of functions such as scanning, printing and Video creation. Each computer has been designed to allow for all of these functions in a secure and reliable fashion, should the need arise each of the computers can be recovered simply within 20 minutes. The ex government supplied computers have mostly been utilised as internet gateways to link the local area networks into the Internet, and were envisaged to be provided with Terminal services over the internet or from the local server in Tolaga and Te Karaka. Each site can act on it’s own as an access point for local services. Or as a group they can all access the Internet. And they can be configured to access through the Internet a back end server at another location.

Back end server

This back end server is configured to provide a number of services such as

• Web content filtering.
• Web based E-mail.
• Conferencing (Chat rooms, Net-meeting).
• Viral filtering.
• Terminal services.

Broadband

• There is currently limited availability for broadband communications within Gisborne, and no viable options outside of Gisborne.

The main problem that was encountered was that because of the telecommunications structure in place on the east coast there is no viable method for accessing the Internet at the speeds we would ideally need. Currently we are using the IHUG Ultra satellite service, this provided us with an ideal downstream speed to the site, but limited upstream speed. Because of this the idea of deploying the Ex-govt computers to the site as terminal service PC’s had to be scrapped and the conferencing possibilities became severely limited