Lavina Good from Tauranga is well known for her good work in the community. A co-founder of the Good Neighbour Food Rescue charity, she also has governance roles with the Good Neighbour Trust and Te Aranui Youth Trust, is co-founder of youth awareness campaign P Not Once and co-instigator of the Ladies’ Long Charity Lunch and other fundraising events. focus had the pleasure of catching up with Lavina to find out about what fuels her passion and what new community initiatives are on her horizon.
Words: Millie Freeman
Images: Vanessa Laval-Glad, Indigo Moon Films & Photography
Hair & makeup: Sharyn Butters Hair and Makeup Artist
Clothes: Wendy’s Boutique
With a talented team working alongside, Lavina Good is getting ready to launch her latest charitable event – the Food For Thought rescue food extravaganza taking place in Tauranga next month. Using unwanted yet perfectly edible food collected from supermarkets and cafes, business teams – with supervision from Toi Ohomai chefs – will be whisking up an array of street food delights for the public to taste.
Food For Thought will be the biggest rescue food event ever seen in New Zealand and replaces the Ladies’ Long Charity Lunch which Lavina founded. As with that event, funds raised will go to the Good Neighbour Trust and Te Aranui Youth Trust.
Fundraising is not the event’s only aim. It’s also about showing people what you can do with rescue food, and promoting the good work of the two charities and their hard working volunteers, Lavina says.
“It’s going to be exciting and something really different for Tauranga. We hope to get thousands of people along with their whānau, trying lots of different dishes, all made from rescue food.”
Good Neighbour’s objective is transforming communities through its four charitable divisions – community projects, community gardens, food rescue – which Lavina co-founded with John and Jackie Paine in 2014 – and most recently, the Good Neighbour Kitchen. Te Aranui Youth Trust (TAYT) works with young people who may be struggling at home or school and provides mentors and programmes to help them make good life choices.
Lavina knows the feeling of being in “struggle street”, having spent time in a women’s refuge as a kid. “I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of stuff that isn’t so great, and I also think, sometimes bad things happen to good people for no reason. It’s always been in my nature to support others.”
And it’s energising, she says, especially seeing the difference made in a few years. In Good Neighbour’s case, what started as a few kilograms of food has now grown to several tonnes being rescued each week and distributed to the community. At TAYT, Lavina hears from kids who say the organisation made a difference in their lives – at 14 they often didn’t turn up to school and now they’re at university.
FINDING PURPOSE, CHANGING FOCUS
Naturally, you’d expect someone who fits about 101 things into a single day to be time-poor, a little frantic even, especially when having to squeeze in an interview between meetings and phone calls. It was a surprise, therefore, to be greeted with a friendly hug; even more so to be asked about myself, the interviewer.
That’s her inquisitive nature shining through, and what led her, initially, into a journalism career – later becoming a TV sports broadcaster – where she could indulge her fascination of people, travel and love of sport all at the same time. Five years ago she passed up the lure of covering international sporting events for more family time, but you can’t ever take sport, or the media, out of the person, and twice a week she’s still on air commenting on the top sporting stories for Trackside.
“When my three kids were young I struggled with how much was involved in being a parent at home and was captivated by offers of going overseas to cover the Olympics or the netball. But later on I remember I was interviewing Irene van Dyk after the netball and had just missed my daughter’s first goal at hockey and I realised that wouldn’t have bothered me a while ago, but now it did.”
On top of that, the passion she once had for her role was dwindling, and while she waited for her flight home that weekend in 2013, she read an article about Kaibosh, a food rescue service in Wellington. She called them to say that Tauranga needed one too and they put her in touch with the Paines. John and Jackie were involved with Good Neighbour Trust, founded by Campbell Hill, and planned to add a food rescue arm to the organisation.
By this time Lavina and her husband Brendon Good owned Brookfield New World Supermarket and she was acutely aware of the volume of perfectly good food being chucked away and the number of families in Tauranga who struggled to make ends meet.
“It was like this lightbulb went off, that maybe there was something more to my life than what I was doing; maybe I could make a difference somewhere else. In the western world we throw away a third of our food, and that bothered me.”
Over 90 Food Rescue volunteers now help to collect, sort and distribute the food to 55 charities around Tauranga, helping to save around 10 tonnes of food every week that would previously have gone to the landfill. This year Good Neighbour will open a commercial kitchen and training centre for the benefit of communities and charities.
SUCCESS THROUGH COLLABORATION
Lavina says the success of Food Rescue is down to the Good Neighbour pioneers, and the brilliant marrying of John and Jackie’s skills – a combination of systems and strategic planning with tons of energy and motivation to get the food to where it’s needed as soon as possible. At the same time, she is constantly astounded by the passion and tireless commitment of the Te Aranui volunteers who turn up at 7.30 every morning for a breakfast club and work all through the school holidays to make sure the kids have somewhere to go. So what value does she bring?
“My passion is recognising the need and supporting it. I don’t ignore it and put it in the too-hard basket. I recognise that we still have hungry people in our community, we have youth that are unsettled and we have a drug problem in this city, and I think if you don’t address it, things will just get worse. I’m not willing to do that.”
The value she adds is also in being able to generate ideas and funds, hence the move from more hands-on roles into governance where she can make a bigger difference. Where she sees a need, however, she’ll jump right in, such as tacking Tauranga’s escalating drug problem, in particular, the immense damage happening to teenagers who become addicted to P. With friend Jessica Wright she set up the P Not Once campaign which aims to show youth the horrific consequences of taking P, even once, through graphic social media videos. So far two of the five planned videos have gone live, and a radio campaign is scheduled this year.
It all takes money of course, and while she’s an expert fundraiser, Lavina realises there is a limit to what businesses and individuals can give. So, in partnership with Long Lunch partner Katy Martley, she’s set up a business to fund her community initiatives. Since last year Brewbus has been running craft beer tours to boutique breweries in different parts of the country to hear brewers’ stories and sample their beers. All profits will be pumped back into community projects.
“We want to get enough money together to build a community centre in places like Kawerau where young children can come along and do different activities, or hang out near a skate ramp. You can’t always rely on others to give you money; you have to start generating it yourself.”
So if you’re planning your next work gig or friends’ day out, book a Bay of Plenty Brewbus tour and help to support community projects in your region. If you’re looking for other ways to help out, there are plenty of options. Just two hours a fortnight will make a massive difference to beneficiaries of the Good Neighbour Trust, or become a mentor with Te Aranui Trust and support a young person in your community.
As Lavina says, “With a little time and effort you can make a difference if you want to”.
