South Wairarapa Rebus Club

Those attending our last meeting were entertained and informed by Guest Speaker, Dale Williams ONZM JP, Deputy Mayor of Carterton and Chairman of the Youth 2 Work Wairarapa Team. Dale is a trade-certified motor cycle engineer and brings a personal trade- and business-oriented mindset to the provision of jobs for young people. His story is well told in the U-tube record of his TEDx talk, “Small town big change”.

After an apprenticeship as a motor cycle engineer, at 23, he built his early career in Otorohanga with a motorcycle dealership, which grew, over a period of almost 20 years, into a small chain of dealerships across the Waikato King Country, employing predominantly young people and training numbers of apprentices. 

After three terms as a community counsellor, in 2004 he was elected mayor, a position he retained for 9 years. At that time, Otorohanga was a small town, population 2700, suffering from high unemployment, youth crime and vandalism. The ideas for a specific support strategy for youth came to him during his first crisis as mayor when two local teenagers took their own lives. In a subsequent public meeting young people told him: “Otorohanga sucks!” It was a place to get away from. 

At about the same time, local business people with significant family-owned businesses in Otorohanga, employing around 1000 people, told him they were thinking of moving away because they could not get staff. He saw the value of ensuring local job opportunities for school leavers and worked with the industries involved. Dale, an employer and a local educator/trainer led the creation of a suite of successful programmes to support young people, in particular those not destined for a university education, in their transition from school into fulltime work, to make them “work-ready”. 

Individual pastoral care during the transition was a feature of the programme which succeeded on all fronts, achieving zero youth unemployment locally within two years for the first time ever.

His success was such that for six years Dale chaired the New Zealand Mayors’ Taskforce for Jobs which saw a “Youth to Work Strategy”, based on the Otorohanga experience, produced for all communities to share. Dale is an advocate of non-academic vocational pathways, realising that not all young people are suited to academic education.

Youth 2 Work Wairarapa is very active in our region. Their web site shows how they work collaboratively with rangatahi (young people), employers, whānau and educators to ensure ALL young people aged 16-24 years in the Wairarapa have the opportunity to have successful pathways into education, training or employment. 

The South Wairarapa Rebus Club <https://southwairaraparebus.com> meets in the South Wairarapa Working Men’s Club on the fourth Friday morning of each month and organises an outing in those months with a fifth Friday. Anyone in the retired age group who may be interested in SW Rebus Club is welcome to come along to a meeting as a visitor.  Please contact David Woodhams, Past President, 027 430 6988.

By David Woodhams