Downtown Community Ministry – Case Study

As a community organisation with 45+ staff working with our community experiencing homelessness, Downtown Community Ministry (DCM) asked for our help to improve their policies to support their mahi. Here’s what DCM’s Manahautū (Director), Stephen Turnock, had to share about their health, safety, and wellbeing journey with us!

Download the case study, read below or watch our video testimonial.

Why did you choose to work with Working Wise?

As a growing organisation, we started realising our health, safety, and wellbeing framework and approach weren’t quite keeping up to meet the needs of our organisation. That’s when we got Working Wise involved.

At the same time, we weren’t really sure what the needs of the organisation were either. So we engaged with Working Wise, looking for guidance on what we needed to do to bring our health, safety and wellbeing to a level that really supported our direction.

What was the process like?

Working Wise came in to perform a full assessment of our existing approach and systems. We were then able to establish a health, safety and wellbeing strategy that mapped out where we wanted to take our organisation.

We identified eight key priority areas and started setting up the frameworks to deliver on them. We identified improving our reporting as one of those priority areas. Working Wise set up GOSH as a great tool for our people to report health and safety events and hazards, and that’s enabled us to achieve our goals.

Throughout our whole journey, Working Wise has continued to provide us with mentoring, coaching and the support we needed for us to achieve the results we want in our priority areas.

How has Working Wise improved your workplace?

Aside from our GOSH reporting system and all of the processes we have in place, the work we’ve done with Working Wise has really encouraged workplace participation and lifted our staff engagement. We now also have an active Health, Safety, and Wellbeing Committee as a result.

Everything we have done with Working Wise has positively changed our approach to risk as an organisation as well. We have always been focused on the wellbeing of the people we serve, but we needed to widen our lens to include the most important assets of our organisation, our own people. This has empowered us all to do our mahi better, and inspired us to think more about how we can do it in a safer environment.

Our staff are also more physically, emotionally and mentally well in terms of incidentals like burnout and stress, and this approach to wellbeing wasn’t always considered from a traditional ‘health and safety’ perspective before. And because we have staff here more often who are more engaged, we are more responsive in the services we provide for the whānau we serve.

What would you say to others?

Our experience with Working Wise has always been a professional one, and one where we were really challenged to keep pushing forward. Working Wise didn’t come in and give us a list of what to do and how to do it. Instead, they encouraged us to build up our own capability to a level where we could lead the journey ourselves, and then sustain the good work that’s been done. That’s where we feel the benefit of working with Working Wise really came through.