Te Aranui Youth Trust - Helping Youths at Risk in WBOP

Te Aranui Youth Trust empowers young people in the Western Bay of Plenty to engage with their community and make self-aware and conscientious life choices.

Through the delivery of Blue Light, Police Youth Development and Te Ara Poutama Youth Mentoring Programmes, Te Aranui Youth Trust provides a social service that ensures local youths are positive, steadfast, well-adjusted members of the community. We work to build courage and resilience in these young people so that they can resist negative influences and follow a positive path. In developing self-awareness and leadership potential young people start to thrive.

Our Trust’s main focus is on empowering young people along positive pathways to success and providing opportunities that challenge young people, Whanau and communities to make great choices together.

We aim to promote a variety of activities that will enhance the wellbeing of the community. Through the combination of three well known police supported programmes provided by our organisation we are able to work towards achieving the ultimate goal of helping young people contribute in a positive way to the local community.

Examples of projects being delivered by the Trust are Blue Light Safer Young Driver Expo, Kids Gone Fishing, PCT competition and Wahine Toa resilience programme. Youth Mentoring for at risk youths, matching them with good upstanding community volunteers showing them that it is fun and good to make the right decisions. Our final programme is the Great Pathway Youth Development Programme that works one on one with child youth offenders addressing and overcoming the issues that contribute to their negative behaviours.

I believe that with the right support and interventions, all of our young people have a chance to become well adjusted adults who can contribute to their communities in a positive way.

The work our organisation is involved in ranges from ‘Prevention First’ programmes such as the Safer Young Driver Expo, to Youth Mentoring through to Police Youth Development one on one interventions with youths at risk and their families.

Funds raised will help us engage with more youths at risk within our programmes including;

- Mentoring Programme

- Police Community Engagement events

- Police Youth Development interventions including support for education fees, uniforms, sports fees and much more.