Supporting our Rural Communities

The Northern Southland Community Resource Centre Charitable Trust have been meeting the needs of their rural community for twenty years, delivering hundreds of projects and services throughout the region.

Community co-ordinator Cara Colquhoun, along with office support administrator Adele Woodford, run a dizzying array of community events and get-togethers, meeting the unique needs of an often isolated and aging population.

Cara’s scope is broad. There’s constant community networking and case work, information services and workshops, a community garden, support for migrants and youth, school holiday programmes and events and the Storage Room, a space full of donated household items and clothes used to support anyone who needs it.

“Basically, you’re a one-stop person that organises whatever people need,” Cara says.

Working with senior members of the community is a large part of Cara’s role.

There’s monthly seniors’ café sessions, where people meet up at a café in Lumsden for a subsidised coffee and a muffin, a good laugh and a yarn. “Soup and Chats” in winter and “Sandwich and Chats” in summer are held in the Lumsden Memorial Hall, which sometimes include a guest speaker, and at the Lumsden Community Nursery people meet once a week to do some work in the garden and come away with some fresh vegetables. If that’s not enough, Tai Chi is taught buy a qualified instructor at the Lumsden Senior Citizens’ rooms once a week.

Among all of this activity, Cara also provides a more one-on-one service for the seniors she supports, picking up frozen meals from Age Concern in Invercargill, which the Trust subsidises, and distributing them, as well as helping people make their way to appointments.

Connecting with her community is done via Facebook, she says, but the might of Meta has nothing on the Lumsden Light, the Lumsden community newsletter that has been around for half a century and has a circulation of around 1200.

“But, in a small community, I do see the seniors quite a lot, especially when I'm delivering meals. It's more face to face.”

As a not-for-profit, Cara and Adele’s roles, as well as the activities and projects they provide, rely on community funding and grants to operate, which are co-ordinated by the Northern Southland Community Resource Centre Charitable Trust.

“They sort of let me go free range,” she says.

“I'm the only co-ordinator that has actually has lived in Lumsden while being in the role, so that it comes with its challenges. No matter where you go, you’re always seen as Cara the Community Co-ordinator, so I could go to Four Square just to get a bottle of milk for myself

at six o'clock at night and somebody will need to tell me something. But I'm probably the type of person that likes it that way.”