Interactionz shake things up

When an organisation relies on the government for funding and the government changes its strategy, that organisation must innovate or die. 

Interactionz had to make that very choice and evolving with the Government’s changes has not only kept it alive, it has enabled the organisation to help more people than they previously could. 

Not everyone has the same access to community is the concept on which Waikato social enterprise Interactionz is built.  

Interactionz is a charity that was founded 50 years ago to support people with intellectual, physical or sensory disabilities. 

Now, they’ve made a shift into the social enterprise space. 

About 10 years ago, Interactionz was certain that a traditional disability service wasn’t where they wanted to align themselves in the future so they started to look at different ways of working with people with disabilities. 

Business Development Leader Lisa Clausen said one of those ways was community mentoring, which meant that people would be transitioned away from a traditional kind of disability service and would be in the community doing everyday things with everyday people, at everyday places, during everyday times. 

“There was very much an institutional model around disability and that didn’t sit well with our CE, Lynda Millington, who’s been with our organisation for 20 years. 

“So, we have migrated over 20 years from being a sheltered workshop, where people would come and are employed working for very minimal amounts of money to now offering a service that facilitates people living their own very good lives.” 

Lisa said Interactionz had been making this philosophical shift for the past few years.  

“The disability sector in New Zealand, being led by the New Zealand Government’s disability strategy, is now moving towards principles called ‘Enabling Good Lives’. 

“That means that everybody with disabilities will be given the opportunities to make their own choices about their life rather than following an institution type model of what people think they want. 

“We’ve already made that philosophical shift, we’re already delivering community mentoring.” 

Lisa said most of their work with persons with disabilities was funded by contracts where they worked with people on joining the community. 

“However, we know that because of the Government’s movement towards an individualised funding model, which means that a person with a disability will hold their own funding and will choose where they want to purchase their service from, they may not choose to buy Interactionz services. 

“Seeing that this was coming and being in this space for the past decade or so, supporting people with disabilities to become very independent, we always knew that we were in the hands of ministries as to whether that funding would still be given to us. 

“Hence the shift from charity to social enterprise, although we still have charity status,” she said. 

Lisa said Interactionz wanted to be able to maintain their vision – ‘people leading lives that have meaning to them in communities where all can thrive’ – but they knew that they needed to find their own way of achieving that vision without having to rely on Government funding. 

“We are still a charity, we don’t have any shareholders, we have a Lifestyle Trust that sits behind our organisation. Interactionz is our trading brand. There are a board of trustees that govern our organisation from a strategic level,” Lisa said. 

Interactionz Business Development Assistant Danae Cooney said they drew a line in the sand a few years ago and never looked back. 

“We decided that we would start to try and grow the enterprise, in the space of training and visualisation services. 

“We’d done some trainings off and on for youth workers and that training was in PATH (Planning Alternative Tomorrows with Hope) and MAPS (MAPS is used to help people find direction, but doesn’t stand for anything specifically). PATH and MAPS are two graphic planning tools that we use when we’re working with a person. It’s a tool that helps people explore what their good life is, what their ultimate future would be and create some goals to try and make that happen. 

“We wanted to be able to share those tools with other people working in the community space so we started doing that through funding from the Todd Foundation to provide that service. 

“It’s grown over the past two years and now we provide that training for community organisations throughout New Zealand.” 

Danae said another training they’d created was The Art of Community Mentoring. 

“That is about training competent and confident community mentors, so people who are working in the front lines are doing it in a way that is most effective for both themselves and the people that they’re supporting.  

Danae said their other avenue of creating income was Visualisation Services and that was what they also started growing two years ago. 

“Using graphic facilitation techniques, we’ve been learning through doing PATH and MAPS, we knew that we could offer a few different services in that visualisation space. 

“We do visual planning using those same tools for businesses so that they can do strategic planning or leadership planning or team planning – that’s definitely grown a lot. We also do live illustration which is a really good way to be able to capture key ideas that are shared and it’s a great take home for people who’ve gone to the event.” 

She said another really cool tool in that space was translation work. 

“We take already written documents and translate them into a visual image. So, a strategic plan can be made into a graphic.  

“We’ve also done strategy communication with some big organisations where they’ve wanted a way to share their new strategy with their teams we’ve come in and done graphic recording to help support that process,” Danae said. 

Lisa said their client profile was growing and they had done work for Economic Development New Zealand and the likes of, which was an example of their custom facilitation work. 

“We can create a day or half a day for an organisation to facilitate discussion around a topic, but our point of difference will always be that we’ll have a visual element. We have a team of professional facilitators and trainers in the organisation who are qualified adult teachers – six of us – which is very cool,” Lisa said. 

Danae said all the money they made in the space of visualisation services helped subsidise the training work that they are offering in the community space. 

“Both of our courses encourage people to connect with themselves, you have to understand who you are and what you’re bringing to your work. 

“We want to see more people throughout the country being able to experience good lives, that’s the heart of our social impact,” Danae said. 

Interactionz has 13 permanent full-timers, a casual team and a contract team, too. 

“We also have 25 volunteers, without whom we would not be able to deliver the services we deliver in our disability services. 

“We are a pretty small team, we’re pretty agile and adaptable, which is what has been fantastic for us in making this transition,” Danae said.  

Lisa said shifting into commercial services was a massive step. 

“It was a change of mind set. We had the confidence to do it,” said Lisa. 

“The work we are doing is for the community and it’s a really cool space to be in. We love helping other organisations know that they’re doing well too,” Danae said. 

And as a result, Interactionz is about to become one of the first 40 certified social enterprises in New Zealand through the Akina Foundation. 

“That means we become part of the social enterprise marketplace for New Zealand, which means that those businesses that’ve made a commitment to social procurement will be coming to the marketplace to do their shopping and we are part of that. We are really thrilled with that, it’s great validation,” Lisa said.