Christchurch City Mission redevelopment
An artist's impression of the new City Mission facilities.
Christchurch City Mission redevelopment to expand and enhance services
A new era of Christchurch City Mission support for struggling, vulnerable and hard-hit people in Canterbury began this week.
Work is now under way on a redevelopment of our 269-275 Hereford Street site which will transform how we help people get back on track with their lives after we have cared for them in crisis.
We have made a huge impact with our work in Canterbury but this redevelopment will allow
us to do even more and meet the growing need for our help among thousands of people.
The City Mission operates on two sites across from each other on Hereford Street. The redevelopment will see the eastern site cleared and three new buildings erected over
the next few years.
Currently the site houses some old buildings used as housing flats, a small hole-in-the wall café,
and the Hereford Street Op Shop.
The three new buildings hosting multiple services will emerge over two stages. They will host:
A 15-bed transitional housing facility
A café social enterprise
A catering business social enterprise
A new Op Shop social enterprise and warehouse
A new self-serve, mana-enhancing Foodbank
Offices for our social workers
Our emergency accommodation, day programmes, learning hub, residential detox, addiction and mental health services will continue on the eastern side of the campus at 276 Hereford Street.
The redevelopment helps us expand our help beyond the immediate crisis work we will always do and give our clients new skills to be successful in finding permanent housing and find work.
Transitional housing
Coming first will be the 15-bed transitional housing facility and a building that will house our Thrive Café and Catering business social enterprises.
The transitional housing facility fills a missing and important intermediate step in moving someone from our emergency accommodation to successful permanent housing.
This has emerged from our well-known work of offering more than 30 beds a night to the homeless in our men’s and women’s emergency shelters. They remain, of course, but what we wanted to do better was move our residents successfully into permanent social housing in the city.
These are often vulnerable people lacking lifestyle skills and we have found generally about 60 per cent of clients successfully make that move to permanent housing.
Sixty per cent is good, but we can do even better. What was missing was a middle step – transitional housing – where the clients can go after a stay in our emergency accommodation.
It means they are still under our wing and supported by our experts for a few more months while we get them ready to go to permanent spots.
We are excited at how much higher our success will be using our new purpose-built transitional housing complex with every client engaged with a social worker, and able to access our medical clinic, addiction counsellors, and work-readiness courses.
Self-serve Foodbank
In stage 2, a third building will arise that will be home to an exciting educational, self-serve Foodbank, a new Op Shop and warehouse, and offices for our social workers.
The social enterprises will allow us to offer important real-life work experience opportunities for our clients who are in our learning and development programmes and our self-serve social supermarket Foodbank will give clients food with more dignity by offering them choices among food items. This mana-enhancing approach will also create more sustainable use of our food resources because clients will choose what they want to eat rather than us choosing for them.
We will also enhance the experience by bringing an educational aspect. Clients will be guided by our experts and trained volunteers on how to develop healthy shopping habits, and the benefits of good food. We believe this education will bring continuing benefits when they leave our care and shop in normal supermarkets.
Social enterprises
The new redevelopment will house three of our Thrive social enterprise businesses. They are our longstanding Hereford Street Thrive Op Shop, and our Thrive Café and Thrive Catering businesses.
The most important role for these is they give us the opportunity to offer clients real-life yet safe and supportive volunteering, training and intern work experiences which set them up for work in the future. Any profits go towards the City Mission’s work.
The redevelopment will also house our social workers. They provide a service for all our clients who need it and offer a unique drop-in service. We have the only social workers in Canterbury who can been seen immediately without an appointment.
All emergency accommodation clients engage with one of our social workers and they are key to finding what problems our clients are facing and steering them towards our other services that can help, or outside services.