After 120 years of serving the community, the Wellington City Mission has a new $50 million home featuring one of the city's biggest cafes, onsite health practitioners, a supermarket, social workers, and showers. 

Whakamaru is a place for everyone, says City Missioner Murray Edridge, who hopes it will bridge the gap between 'us and them'.

The new Whakamaru building. Image: Re: News.

The first floor has a community shared space with lots of seating next to Craig and Gail’s cafe. Image: Re: News.

Edridge says while their old facilities in Newtown served the community they weren’t very nice and weren’t somewhere the general public would choose to hang out. 

He hopes Whakamaru will change that. 

The facility has just opened in the Wellington suburb of Mount Cook and will be operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

Re: News took a tour of Whakamaru before its opening and spoke to Edridge and City Mission regular-turned-staff member Raymond McMahon about what it means to serve their community. 

Whakamaru has a social supermarket where people can shop for free groceries with dignity, Edridge says. Images: Re: News.

Whakamaru aims to provide wrap-around support through a range of services, including a social supermarket where people can shop for free, on-site health practitioners and social workers, and shower and laundry amenities. 

Thirty-five apartments on the upper levels will provide long-term transitional housing for individuals and families who are experiencing homelessness, or at risk of it. 

Those units will provide, on average, 12 months of accommodation to around 45 people with a particular focus on rangatahi, Edridge says.  

Whakamaru will also be the place of work for around 70 City Mission staff members.

Showering facilities which are open to all. Image: Re: News.

Lockers for storing laundry, which anyone can come and get done for free. Image: Re: News.

There’s also a large contribute-what-you-can cafe, several meeting spaces and a chapel, all of which are spaces designed to bring the general public in so they can connect with people from different backgrounds.

“This idea of Whakamaru is that we're creating a community with no ‘us’ and ‘them’... The things that distinguish us get minimised when we share space,” Edridge says. 

He wants Wellingtonians to “learn that our community is full of really different and interesting people”. 

“They’re not scary and they're not bad, they're just on a different journey.”

Wellington City Missioner Murray Edridge. Image: HOWIE.

Raymond McMahon, also known as the Newtown Ninja. Image: HOWIE. 

Raymond McMahon says he left his family decades ago when he was young and has been on his own since. 

The 54-year-old says he spent years experiencing homelessness and joblessness, alternating between living on the streets and staying in other people’s homes. 

“It wasn't just a job I needed. I needed a purpose in life. Yeah, I needed to connect with people, because I was pretty much isolated for at least about 22 years,” he says. 

Raymond says his strong faith in God brought him to the Mission in 2014 and helped him get involved in his community. 

The chapel has a cross but is designed as a place of prayer for all religions. Images: Re: News. 

Initially drawn in by the Mission’s chapel facilities, Raymond was offered a volunteer position which he held for six years before becoming a paid staff member. 

He says he likes to keep his head down and stay busy with work, spending his time cleaning, doing deliveries, working in the kitchen and floating around to see if anyone needs anything. 

All of it has helped him make friends and meet a lot of people in his community, who have nicknamed him the “Newtown Ninja”. 

Raymond says the Mission has made a huge difference in his life and describes Whakamaru as “pretty awesome”. 

Craig and Gail’s cafe can provide a crisis recovery service around the clock. Images: Re: News.

‘Whakamaru’ means to shelter and protect, and one of the ways the Mission aims to do that is through Craig and Gail’s cafe. 

Murray Edridge says the cafe can seat 104 people, making it one of the biggest cafes in Wellington, and his experience tells him it’s likely to be full a lot of the time. 

Alongside offering food and drink for a koha, the cafe doubles as a crisis prevention and response service, where people can receive immediate mental health support in a non-clinical setting. 

“At a time when police are now pulling back from some of their mental health call outs, it's a place where people can come to 24/7, to get what they need.”

One of the single-person housing units in Whakamaru. Images: Re: News.

Edridge says the biggest challenge for Wellingtonians experiencing hardship is always housing. 

“There's not enough houses, they're too expensive, and they're not a good enough quality. 

“And when people are spending a significant proportion of their available income on housing costs, there just isn't enough money to pay the bills, to buy the food, to pay the power.”

After that time period, the Mission is committed to placing residents into permanent housing. 

The accommodation units have ensuites and kitchenettes. Images: Re: News.

Whakamaru has a number of shared “bump spaces” where residents and staff will bump into each other and form relationships. 

Furniture outside the accommodation floors is being set up. Strong netting allows for openness between the different floors while still protecting residents from falling. Images: Re: News.

Free meeting rooms are another way Whakamaru aims to get the general public to use the space. 

Murray Edridge hopes community and corporate groups use them and, in doing so, spend time around people who potentially aren’t as well off as they are.  

There are large and small meeting rooms available for free. Images: Re: News.

While the official opening ceremony for Whakamaru took place on October 30, the facility is having a phased opening for staff and manuhiri, and will become open to the public on November 18. 

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