Cup of coffee to a national and international movement for safeguarding children, and now approaching a prestigious national award recognising “communities achieving powerful collective impact”.
Stoke-based charity Safeguarding Children Initiative is a New Zealand Community Leader of the Year semi-finalist for its “innovative training”, “policy advocacy”, and “nationwide collaboration” to recraft the response to child abuse and neglect in homes and other spaces where children commonly gather.
Co-founder and chief executive, Willow Duffy, says a spot in the penultimate round acknowledges the Nelson-based team, its voluntary board and the 89,000 people who are now equipped with the competencies to reduce child abuse and neglect rates since its 2011 inception.
“It’s just incredibly exciting…It’s the pride of something that started in Nelson,” she says. “The best outcome for children is when they get help early… we were all children once, and many of us will have been in situations where we felt unsafe, or we’ve been harmed.
“We get feedback from the people that have done the training to say how much it has helped them, how much it’s clarified situations for them... and how it has prevented abuse from happening.”
The charity was initiated by Willow and two other community nurses, Annette Milligan and Kate Dawson, and detective Neil Kitchen from the local child protection team, due to disproportionate child maltreatment by adults who lacked training, confidence and systems to rectify it.
It has a team working across Aotearoa and internationally through in-person training, e-learning, advocacy and consultancy. It works alongside government, community and private sector organisations to embed robust, prevention-focused child-safe systems and culture across sectors.
Willow says it has recently developed the child protection policies and training for Uber for Teens in Australia and New Zealand, a supervised service for young people to book their own Uber rides and food deliveries. The organisation’s work has also been recognised in government policies and, most recently, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State Care.
Award finalists will be announced on 26 February.
