Community outreach through ACROSS
Graeme Munford, Director of ACROSS.
ACROSS Te Kotahitanga O Te Wairua was started up in 1990 as a partnership between the Catholic and Anglican parishes in Palmerston North. At that time ACROSS – Anglican and Catholic Social Services – expressly aimed to reach out and support groups at crisis point. Today we offer a range of programmes and services for children and their families, including counselling, support groups for children and one-on-one support for families in their homes.
We also offer support to individuals.
Our name represents the importance of caring about people’s lives through their spirit (wairua) and working alongside others, including other churches, as an expression of solidarity (kotahitanga).
ACROSS is governed by a board of three representatives from local Catholic and Anglican parishes. This model of working together is unique. While both churches share the same values and aims, pooling resources was the initial motivation 20 years ago and it has gone on to be an extremely successful outreach for both denominations. Our team of faith-based and professional staff and facilitators has grown from small beginnings to serve our community and to ensure no-one is left behind.
We are now well known and advertise our programmes and services through churches and other community organisations. As a community agency there is no expectation for people to pay for our services. We are now seeing second-generation families with some still recounting their earlier experience of ACROSS as being the light at the end of the tunnel.
There are many ways people can contribute to our work and be part of our programme, eg by sponsoring a family or one of our programmes, offering time on our committee, volunteering or foster parenting.
We rely on feedback to help ensure we are providing the right sort of help. Examples of how people can support us are best reflected in feedback we receive. A person who had received counselling at ACROSS said: ‘For me the big thing was that someone followed up when I didn’t feel like seeing or hearing from anyone – I don’t know what would have happened if they hadn’t bothered.’
Others have said the most transformative thing for them is that ‘staff did what they said they would do’, especially when often their experience of relationships was others had let them down. A common theme is that people respond positively when they feel they are simply being treated fairly and their individual circumstances are respected.
A challenge for agencies like ACROSS is to be recognised by the churches they represent as integral to their own outreach.
Because of the practical work we do, agencies such as ours are the heart and soul of community. However, we should not leave the care and concern for others in our community only to such agencies. We must all show each other the seeds of what Jesus called ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’.
Please visit www.across.org.nz for more information.