‘Doers’ making a difference

Lynette McFadden / Business Owner & Mentor, Harcourts gold / @lynette_mcfadden

I look forward to my monthly column, and I’ve never failed to be inspired by the editor’s choice of theme. This month it’s ‘Makers and Creators’, and despite this being an enormous subject, I’ve decided to put my own slant on it and write about ‘doers’.

All of us know people who fit into this category. They’re definitely ‘makers’ and invariably ‘creators’, and they have an incredible ability to drive change. 

Here’s a story about one such person I have recently met, and I’ll let you decide if they fit your sense of what someone making a difference looks like. 

Enter Kate Pauling. Kate contacted me in her position as founder of a charity called Full Bellies. Kate and her small, dedicated team work to help supply children living in our northwest suburbs with lunches. You might ask, why these areas in particular? I did, and this was the answer: the children attend schools that rate as decile 10. For those not familiar with the decile system, it’s a rating structure based on census data for households with school-aged children in each school’s catchment area. The data gathered uses household measures such as income, parents’ occupations, and the number of people in the home, etc. Essentially, it identifies barriers to learning faced by kids in lower socio-economic families. Although decile 10 sits at the top of this rating system, what Kate and many others have recognised is that within these areas, there are definitely families struggling and being a decile 10 school doesn’t preclude kids who have been doing it hard. 

With no funding allocation for things like lunches and additional snacks, there was a big gap at some of these schools when it came to helping their more vulnerable students. This is where Kate came in, recognising that need and, having been contacted by schools, she started in March helping eight children, and now this number is 170, twice a week. She and the team make lunches and snacks, which are delivered early morning to the schools, and they are wrapped like everyone else’s, so there’s no labelling or shame attached for the kids receiving this help. 

I’m told they are all deeply appreciative; that’s the students, teachers, parents, and anyone else who has the interest of others in mind. Our incredible business, team of consultants, and I are now a small part of Kate’s team, and without her initial approach, we wouldn’t have been able to help – financially and practically. 

It’s actually encouraged us as a team to go even further, and that’s involved a large contribution to KidsCan, which I’ve been told by their CEO, Julie Chapman, now feeds 50,000 children a day across New Zealand. 

I talked with my dad about this dire statistic, and even though he was bought up in the ‘40s in a working-class family of nine, and there was considerable hardship all around them, there wasn’t the food insecurity there is today. 

So, in looking at creators, I’ve looked at the broadest of contexts. I’ve tried to think about what makes someone put their own hand up to make a difference. Is it curiosity? Is it care? Or is it all of that and a big dose of humanity too?