“Food.” One word changed what we do.

Our food pantry is stocked with essentials ready to quietly support young people and whānau when they need a little extra help.

When we asked young people what we could be doing that we weren't already, one simple answer stayed with us.

We regularly ask our young people what they need from us and where we could do better. When we asked if there was something we could provide that we weren't already, one young person gave us a simple answer.

“Food. A lot of us don't have it and we feel ashamed to ask for it.”

It was a simple sentence, but we knew straight away that we needed to respond.

Our fundraising team quickly put together Give What You Can, a simple community food drive built around a simple idea: if lots of people each gave one or two items, together we could make a real difference.

And we wanted to learn from it too.

We were interested in seeing how our supporters wanted to give and whether there was an appetite in the community to help meet practical needs like this. The response gave us a pretty clear answer.

People wanted to help.

Businesses, organisations, schools and individuals all got behind the drive. Craigs Investment Partners, Ricoh, First Mortgage Trust, Lyttleton Health Centre, Belfast Medical Centre and Avonside Girls' High School were among those who collected and donated food, alongside many people from our wider community.

Our pantry filled up. What started as a quick response to a piece of feedback has become something much more useful than we initially imagined. A quiet way to help

The pantry isn't open for people to come in and browse. That's deliberate. Our team know the young people and whānau we work with. They can recognise when someone could use a bit of extra help and, where appropriate, put together a food parcel and quietly get it to them. There is no big conversation. No need to explain yourself at a counter. Just a practical response when it's needed.

We've now provided more than 50 food parcels.

Our Attendance Team has found the pantry particularly valuable. Food insecurity can be one of the things sitting behind a young person's difficulty getting to school. Having food available means our Attendance Navigators can respond to an immediate need while they're working alongside a whānau on the bigger picture.

It can also help open a door. There is something very familiar about turning up to someone's house with a plate of kai. It's a very Kiwi way of showing someone you care. We're just taking that idea a little further.

From a food drive to something we can keep doing

We knew the original donations wouldn't last forever, so we were really grateful when Craigs Investment Partners backed Te Tahi Youth for a community funding application with Foodstuffs South Island. That resulted in $5,000 in supermarket vouchers, giving us a way to keep the pantry stocked beyond the original Give What You Can campaign.

That's something we didn't know would happen when we first received that one-word answer.

And that's perhaps the most important part of the story.

We asked our young people what they needed.

Someone told us.

We listened.

And our community helped us do something about it.