Korero with Susan

Kia ora koutou, ngā mihinui,
 
It is with mixed feelings that I write this, my last Director's column, for the Champion Centre's newsletter.  After almost 17 years as Director I will be moving on to the next phase of my life at the end of August. Although sad to leave, I am looking forward to having time for research and to adding to the list of publications produced by a range of individuals associated with the Champion Centre over the years. (See our website for the bibliography as well as the other materials for both families and professionals.)

My job at the Champion Centre has been the very best I have had, and I have only appreciation and awe for the incredible work of the Centre. I am therefore extremely pleased and relieved to be able to pass the baton on to Wendy Entwistle, our newly appointed Executive Director.  Wendy will soon be joined by a new Clinical Director, and together they will no doubt weather the challenges of meeting the needs of children and families in the years to come.

The Champion Centre is a place that truly translates the science of human development into practice and makes it possible for infants and young children with challenges to their development to reach their full potential.  That it has been able to do this for more than 40 years while being chronically under-funded is testament to the dedication of staff and the generosity of private donors and trusts who help us plug the gap between government funding and programme costs.

My parting plea, therefore, is for each person who reads this newsletter to make a donation to the Centre.  It could be a regular donation or a larger one-off.  Your donation would be the best parting gift I could receive.  Please mark it 'Susan's goodbye' so I know you have heard my plea! 

Noho ora mai,
Dr Susan Foster-Cohen

Through the lockdown, arts therapy student Kate Willis realised that a lot of charities were struggling to find opportunities to fundraise. She decided that she wanted to do something, even if it was small, to make a difference. While walking around her neighbourhood during the lockdown, Kate realised that she could create a product that could be a memento to people from this time in isolation and help even just a few people in this strange and hard time. She started drawing and came up with the Teddy Bears in the Window series. She has designed a range of greeting cards that are being sold to help raise funds for three different charities, including The Champion Centre.

'Even to make a small difference to one or two children would be amazing,' says Kate. Kate raised $1000 for charity from her Teddy Bears in the Window card series, of which $300 has been given to the Champion Centre. We are very grateful that she was able to use her talents over the lockdown to benefit the Centre. 

An 'isolation idea' over lockdown saw professional artist Gwyn Hughes busy with a fundraising initiative in support of the Champion Centre. He was keen to acknowledge the incredible work our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, was doing during the recent COVID-19 events and began creating a large portrait in oils.

The original artwork was auctioned on Trade Me and took the interest of over 29,000 people. Radio station ‘The Breeze’ interviewed Gwyn, where he told of his passion to support the Centre’s intervention programmes. The auction also got a mention on ‘The Project’ on TV3.
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A portrait and landscape artist specialising in commission pieces and original works, Gwyn has a lengthy career in the arts internationally, and now here in New Zealand. He has recently won the ‘People’s Choice’ with the Adam Portraiture Award 2020 through the New Zealand Portrait Gallery.  
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Gwyn has very kindly gifted oil paintings to both the ‘Art from the Attic’ fundraiser and the 40th Anniversary Gala’s ‘live auction’ in 2018 and has donated $5000 to our early intervention programmes from his depiction of Jacinda Ardern. We sincerely appreciate his time and talents.
http://www.gwyn.co/

Lead psychologist and Centre Management Team member, Dr. Alison Gray, has left her role to pursue other interests, after nine years at The Champion Centre. Before coming to the Centre in 2011, Alison had been a clinical psychologist in the UK, working largely with children, adolescents and families, including those with developmental delays and disabilities, since the 1980's.

'Dad was an educational psychologist and quite well known in the UK. Originally, I wanted to go into teaching, but took psychology to keep my options open. On graduating, I studied clinical psychology and then worked for the NHS (the National Health Service) in the UK,' says Alison. Alison came to New Zealand in 2002 with her farmer husband, John and three sons. John had lived in New Zealand during his OE and had always wanted to come back. Then 'In 2001 there was the Foot and Mouth outbreak in the UK and all our cattle on our farm were slaughtered. We came over to NZ after that for a holiday over Christmas. During that time, we decided we wanted to move here for good, so we applied for residency and arrived at the end of 2002,' says Alison.

 Earlier this year we put out a request to our Champion community to help us with a quote for custom built office desks to house our growing staff of specialists and therapists. We’d outgrown our current space and needed a design concept that would maximise what we had and ensure each of our fantastic team members had a place to call their own. Misco Joinery wasted no time in heeding the call and taking up the challenge. It was a huge undertaking, with seven offices needing an upgrade but nothing seemed too much trouble for the Kaiapoi joinery company, who made it clear from the start that this office fitout would be a gift to the Champion Centre.

The fabulous folks at Misco designed, planned and prefabricated customised desk units for the seven offices, a set of pigeonholes and a large hall cupboard, in time to welcome the team back for the new term. Penny, Jess, Chris and his team did an awesome job of transforming the Champion Centre’s workspace.

We are humbled once more by the munificent support from Graeme Rose, Managing Director at Window Treatments NZ Ltd. Graeme contacted us after hearing about our office upgrade, and hearing that the old window fittings in the offices were in a bit of disrepair. Graeme and his team offered to restore, clean and replace our blinds and curtains to a standard befitting our new workplace upgrade as a wonderful gift in-kind. With the clean, repaired and brand-new window treatments in place, we are feeling very proud of our Champion Centre makeover.

Our heartfelt thanks to:
Ready Made Blinds Ltd (who supplied our new blinds)
The Blind Care Company (who cleaned our existing blinds)
And Window Treatments NZ Ltd, the company that Ready Made Blinds and The Blind Care companies are subsidiaries of.

We express our warm appreciation to Mike and Glenn and the Misco team, and Graeme and his Window Treatments staff for their generosity, expertise and time. The difference this project has made to our devoted team here at the Centre is priceless. We can’t wait to welcome visitors and show off our purpose-built offices. You’d have to agree they have done an outstanding job!

Thank you Misco Joinery & Window Treatments from all of us at The Champion Centre!

With a new landscape to navigate, it is no longer ‘business as usual’ around the globe, and the Champion Centre is no different. We are rising to the challenge and we have explored and created remote engagement with our community over the ‘lockdown’ period, moved with agility and responded to the changes in our current environment. We are doing much more with a lot less. While the Centre is feeling grateful and positive about the community support we are experiencing, many of our usual funding opportunities are now insufficient to satisfy the urgent needs of the charitable sector.

Funding grant makers are confronted with difficult decisions about where to distribute limited resources. We are continually reflecting on what we need to do to rethink, recover and rebuild. As a Centre, we are looking at how we can remain sustainable now, and into the future. We urgently need to explore and establish new partnerships, as it is clear that the philanthropic sector, and those investing in social impact initiatives will now need to revise their practices, in order to respond to a significantly altered economy. With lost revenue through postponed, cancelled and declined grant rounds, gaming trusts and fundraising initiatives, we are now faced with reaching out, as never before, to cover the most basic of our programme expenses.

The time for action is here! What we experience as a society, and the input and choices we make now, will affect the outcomes and lives of the generations of children that follow us. By thinking and working differently with our community and other philanthropic partners, we want to be well positioned to continue to provide the vital intervention services we have delivered for over 42 years.

Many of the children who come through the Champion Centre have disabilities that are immediately apparent to others. But there are many others whose challenges, while less obvious, nonetheless impact all aspects of their lives and the lives of the parents who raise them.  This is the story of one young man, now in his twenties whose mother shared her story with us. We are not going to identify him or his parents because, as his mother said in her interview with us, “when someone has already been identified as having a disability…the disability becomes the identity, rather than this is […] and he has strengths and he has weaknesses” like the rest of us. 

At about 18 months of age, delays in this child’s development led to a referral to the Champion Centre. Staff observed his terrified and unpredictable responses to loud noises, other children, animals, lights; his dislike of certain kinds of touch; his inability to express himself when highly anxious; and his ‘enthusiasms’ as autism expert Barry Prizant would call them: things he liked to do repeatedly and that calmed him down.  In response, the Champion Centre team worked with his parents to provide support at the Centre and at his pre-school, where he was lucky to have an excellent teaching team. As his mother said, ‘There was a whole network of support.’

Thanks to the team of three-thousand! The Champion Centre is up and running again!  The last few weeks have been challenging for the entire Champion Centre whānau: our current children and their families, our staff, our supporters and our funders – more 3000 people.

Although we have not been able to welcome children and families to the Centre, I have been amazed at the creativity and innovation that staff and families have shown in continuing to support the children’s development.  Staff have been checking in with families and each other on a very regular basis, coaching via video chat on Zoom, developing resources, and dropping off equipment (without contact, of course). For their part, families have been sending videos of their children doing things they’ve worked on, seeking help for particular issues, and discussing next steps including transitions to school, hospital appointments and more. 

As we get used to the new normal of Level 2, it is really good to know that the dedication, hard work, and passion of our wonderful team has not been dimmed by the threat of COVID19.  In all respects we have shown ourselves to be an awesome team, and you are part of it!

We would like to give a very big thank you to two very generous women who have donated their time and creativity in producing beautiful hand-crafted items, in support of the Centre during the pandemic. 

Debby Heard, one of our Centre grandmothers, has knitted this unique one-off Jacinda Bear. This is her largest project to date, after several other bears were created during the pandemic. Jacinda Bear is currently up for sale on Trade Me https://www.trademe.co.nz/Browse/Listing.aspx?id=2628932343 with the auction closing Wednesday 27 May. Debby, once again, is very generously giving 100% of the auction proceeds to the Centre so we encourage you to get behind this and share it with your family, friends and communities.
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Debby’s earlier ‘Midwife Bear’ sold on Trade Me for $186. Debby also created a ‘Dr Ashley Bear’ that sold for $500, which Debby kindly donated to the Centre. The purchaser of the bear has gifted him to the children's cancer ward at Christchurch Hospital.

​A recent response to the economic impact of the pandemic and the need to buy local, was the set-up of a Facebook page called New Zealand Made Products. To date, it has hundreds of local producers, artisans and charities promoting their goods and services.

​Earlybird, the story of the baby pukeko that hatched early and how he learnt to fly, is also in the pipeline to feature on this page. This children’s story book was created by The Champion Foundation and all proceeds from sale of the books and prints go to The Champion Centre. 
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The book is available in English and Te Reo Māori. Illustrated prints are also available for purchase online:
​https://www.facebook.com/groups/519618962054849/search/?query=andrea%20heffernan&epa=SEARCH_BOX

For more than 10 years, Ray has kindly contributed monthly towards the rental of an aquarium that sits in the foyer of the Centre and has brought great joy to the children who attend the programme. The tank is a focal point at the entry to the Centre for many of the 100 young children who visit weekly, as the gently moving fish provide an attractive and calming transition from the intensity of the outside world into the gentle ambiance of the Centre.
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​Ray started work as an orderly at Burwood Hospital, right next door to the Champion Centre and stayed there 37 years, until his retirement six years ago. His first job was on the maternity ward; then in 1979 he became the first orderly to work on the spinal unit. For many years Ray would deliver the mail to the Centre and got to know some of the staff, particularly those in the office, as he always enjoys a chat.

I ask Ray what he liked most about working at Burwood, ‘the people,’ says Ray. ‘I helped to deliver two babies in my time, one in the carpark and one when a woman went into labour in the lift and delivered in the corridor.’

I point out that walking the long corridors must have been great training. ‘16 kms a day we used to walk. I wore a pedometer when we were raising funds for Telethon in the 1980’s, so I know that.’

It all started back in 1977, when Ray smoked 30 cigarettes a day and weighed 114kg. A health scare jump started him into running for fitness. Ray has now clocked up 8 ultra-marathons (80kms), 39 marathons and run several 100-mile races, and this May he was set to run his 40th marathon (event now cancelled). Ray, who is 71 in April, competes in the over 70-year category and proudly states there are few competitors in that group now. 

What has kept Ray interested in running for so many years? ‘I feel so much better. I started slow and built it up. I find I eat better, and running is good for sleep, however I now enjoy a nap in the afternoon to recharge.’ Other than arthritis and the odd niggle, Ray still keeps fit. I think we can all take a leaf out of Ray's book.