About Us

Good Neighbour is all about community support. We provide practical help and facilitate key connections.

With our work we address poverty to positively transform neighbourhoods and communities, and build relationships.

Did you know that poverty goes much further than not having money? It’s about having a lack of access. For example, a lack of access to other people, education, healthcare, employment, a home, and food. This disconnect can lead to isolation, depression, identity issues, family violence and many other levels of hardship.

At Good Neighbour, we enable communities and their people to access what they need in their life to thrive/flourish. We always focus on giving people a hand up instead of handout.

We support people by:

Providing a place where people have a sense of belonging.
Creating connections that empower them to improve the quality of their lives.

Lifting everyday burdens of people living in the Bay of Plenty area through the simple principle: “give, provide service and make someone’s day”. When burdens are lifted, people can focus on other areas of need in their lives.

Our work

We offer various types of support:

1. Food rescue, where we collect and redistribute food that is good enough to eat but not good enough to sell. This food is distributed to over 70 organisations in the Bay of Plenty who then connect with the people they support.
2. Urban mahi, where it’s all about practical help and manpower. This team organises neighbourhood projects, provides firewood and coordinates the community gardens in Bethlehem.
3. The Good Neighbour Kitchen is about educating and mentoring students, volunteers and community members to use food on hand to create nutritious meals, minimising food waste to landfill.
4. Our Care team offers tailored support to people in our community who are in challenging life circumstances or even in crisis. By addressing their immediate needs, we can help uncover deeper issues and assist them with goal setting, connect them to our network, encourage them to grow their own capabilities and inspire them to thrive.

To create a multiplier effect and to increase our impact, we offer mentoring and advice to other community organisations so they can also succeed in making a difference in people’s lives, today and tomorrow. Want to know more? Get in touch with us on 07 394 4249 or office@goodneighbour.co.nz

Our history

How it all started in 2011

In 2011 a group of mates went to Fiji to build a medical dispensary.

We were inspired to see how the power of community could achieve so much in a short amount of time.

It was amazing to see that by working together we could make such a positive difference in the local Fijian community.

This was the start of our journey and many conversations about how we could use this same power of community to make positive changes to our neighbourhoods here in New Zealand.

The beginning of Neighbourhood Projects

The Fiji trip left us asking “Is it possible that people in our own communities could work together to make our local neighbourhoods a better place to be?”

By meeting practical needs, could we build better relationships, and begin the journey of transforming our communities through simple acts of generosity and kindness? We think it can.

A small group of us began to meet to dream and brainstorm about what this could look like. Good Neighbour Aotearoa Trust was born and we began the process of making this a charitable organisation.

What started as a very practical organisation that was focused on meeting needs through projects soon branched out to other areas. Each has its own starting point and story that combined makes Good Neighbour very unique in what we can offer to our community.

The beginning of Food Rescue

What started as a very practical organisation that was focused on meeting needs through projects soon branched out to include distributing food good enough to eat (that otherwise would be going to waste in land fill) to charities.

John and Jackie Paine began investigating this concept.

A trip to Wellington to look at a food rescue organisation called Kaibosh, was the catalyst for Good Neighbour Food Rescue to become a reality.

Lavina Good, a community minded person, independently contacted Kaibosh who put her in contact with the Paines. The trio began working together to move Good Neighbour Food Rescue forward. Next came a period of assessing the need of community organisations and the availablity of food in a feasibilty study funded by the “Working together more fund.” Early in 2014 a trial of picking up food then sorting it ready for community organisations to pick up, quickly led to the establishment of Good Neighbour Food Rescue.

Food Rescue is growing rapidly and has huge potential. It became the second arm of Good Neighbour.

In the meantime, John and Jackie have moved on to start new social support initiatives, such as the Social Supermarket in Otūmoetai that opened in October 2022.

The beginning of Community Gardens

Good Neighbour Trust’s Community Gardens at Bethlehem are the result of awesome foresight and a lot of planning by some incredibly insightful individuals.

Al and Anne Gourley had started an organisation called “Let’s Get Growing” to set up community gardens where people could rent a small garden to grow vegetables together.

“Let’s Get Growing” needed a charitable trust to be a part of and they approached us for a collaboration. In partnership with Bethlehem Community Church, who are the generous landowners, the gardens were built and in the meantime have become a place where people not only grow food, but friends too.

This became the third arm of Good Neighbour.

The beginning of Good Neighbour Kitchen

From the beginning of Good Neighbour Food Rescue we have been inspired by Robert Egger, the founder of LA Kitchen. He began a Food Rescue service but was then challenged to think through how to make a lasting change in people’s lives rather than just handing out food. So he began a kitchen using rescued food to train people who had come out of the prison system.

At Good Neighbour we are very conscious of providing a hand up rather than a handout. Our Food Rescue policy is to work closely with organisations who are providing services to help people improve their lives and break the cycle of poverty.

The other thing we have grappled with is how to create financial sustainability within Good Neighbour and so have been researching Social Enterprise examples around NZ and the world.

Out of all this research the model that seemed to most fit what we do, using what we have (food) and who we are, was to develop a kitchen-based training and mentoring programme mixing together food that is seen as worthless with people who are currently unemployable to create food that is saleable and people who have marketable qualifications.

In the meantime, we’ve built a kitchen at our premises in Burrows St and the first programme started early 2019.

This became the fourth arm of Good Neighbour.

The beginning of Firewood

Firewood started when we read about a family in the newspaper whose firewood was stolen. We wanted to help, so we made some calls, found some trees and started chopping and splitting to get the firewood ready for them.

We realised that there were also other people in the community who couldn’t afford to heat their homes.

And that was the beginning of our firewood department, which has now transformed into a high-tech facility that allows us to deliver hundreds of m3 of firewood to families in the Bay every year.

The beginning of the Care Team

The Care Team was developed as we realised there was a need to journey alongside people and give them a better outlook on life by offering them hope and connection.

In our first year we ‘journeyed’ with ten families and worked intensively on improving many areas of their lives that they needed support with.

We now offer many programmes to educate people with i.e. finance, cooking, home care, parenting and building relationships.