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Fun events just the ticket for trust organiser

Flagstaff Team

From her Fort Takapuna office, Maria Teape helps ‘make community happen’. She tells Helen Vause about the pleasure she takes in seeing generations of locals enjoy themselves – sometimes in a scary way.

Community-minded… Maria Teape outside her Devonport Peninsula Trust office at Fort Takapuna

From the window of Maria Teape’s office in an old barracks building on Fort Takapuna, she has a perfect view rolling down across grassy slopes to Narrow Neck Beach and the sea. In summer, there are swimmers and small boats, and year round dog walkers cross the foreground.

In all, it’s a pretty good spot from which to be overseeing a calendar of events that brings a regular dose of fun for local kids and families.

Teape’s been in the job as community coordinator for the Devonport Peninsula Trust (DPT) for more than nine years now, longer than her predecessors.

At more events than she could easily recall, countless happy kids have come and gone, growing up with the memories of enjoyable occasions.

And that makes Teape happy in the job she loves.

“Sure, it’s quiet up here, but it’s beautiful and I’m very easy to find,” she laughs, wav- ing out the window at the distinctive DPT flag fluttering on the grass outside.

She’s in charge of “making community happen”.

From preschool play sessions to the Bayswater Halloween Trail, kids athletics and much more, she’s proud of the free events she, her team and volunteers organise and run. They are also firmly committed to supporting events initiated in other corners of the community, from midwinter swims to music festivals down in the village.

At this stage of her career, Teape can’t think of a better job. And for the mother of two grown-up children, it’s brought her back to the playgrounds and beaches of her own childhood.

Teape is very much a local girl. She can claim to have been born in Devonport’s Pentlands Hospital. “Okay, I must have been one of the last,” she laughs.

She went to Belmont Primary, Belmont Intermediate and Takapuna Grammar schools, and now lives in Bayswater Ave with her husband Nigel and kids Max and Michaela. Home is the house she grew up in, as her mother Kerrie was brought up in before her. Kerrie, one of the Simmonds family, met her Swiss husband-to-be, Bruno, on her travels before bringing him home to start a life together on the peninsula.

Kerrie’s father Neal grew up in Stanley Bay in a house that his parents built in First Avenue. That couple were Teape’s great-grandparents, Mary (nee Spragg) and Harold Simmonds.

Mary’s father, Wesley Spragg, an influential man of the day, owned land in the Waitakeres, which he eventually left to the city – an area now known as Spraggs Bush. In Auckland history, he is noted as a very successful butter manufacturer, a benefactor – and a vigorous temperance campaigner.

When Teape and Nigel set up in her childhood home, her working life involved long days over the bridge in the city. For 10 years, she worked in bank administration, running projects that included preparation for the ‘Y2K’ bug, when it was feared computer systems could crash as the millennium rolled over in 2000. Banks were among the institutions that worked hard to counteract any potential disasters.

“We can look back and laugh now, but it was very important at the time and a huge amount of work went into the lead-up to the millennium,” she recalls.

When her daughter was born over two decades ago, Teape imagined that she would take maternity leave then return to her job and corporate life in the city.

Three years later, when son Max was born, her city job was a distant memory.

But like many other women at home with small kids, she’d found it hard to replace the peer support a job brings, or meet other mothers in her new life at home in the suburbs.

“I guess it hadn’t been something I’d thought about. But having kids brings about big changes and somehow you have to get out there and meet people, meet other mothers.

“You need to see what there is out there on your doorstep.”

First moves to reach out included joining the local Plunket committee, then becoming committee secretary.

She became a Playcentre parent, commit- ted to hands-on preschooling and surrounded by local parents and small children. As her children moved on to school, she seized the opportunity to become a parent helper at Waterwise on Narrow Neck beach.

“What an incredible privilege Waterwise is for us. We’d have parents new to the country who just couldn’t believe they were out there doing this with their kids.”

After a decade of full-time parenting, she’d squeezed in a bit of writing and a diploma in communications. She’d eased back into work as a coordinator for the Cystic Fibrosis Association, when she saw the job with her name on it. The DPT was looking for a new coordinator and Teape saw her future.

Today, after the worst year for events everywhere, and the greatest focus on community well-being, her wide smile and enthusiasm have endured.

“Obviously it was hard to plan, but no one knew what was going to happen next,” she says.

She’s proud of the very successful Takara- ro Spring Festival launched last year, which drew hundreds onto Cambria Reserve on a November Saturday afternoon, to shake off the worst of the winter and lockdowns. The next morning, she and her team were down at the beach at Windsor Reserve helping with the winter-swim event.

“It’s certainly a very highly engaged community with many interest groups for all ages.”

“I really feel community is at the heart of life,” says Teape, who believes Devonport is pretty well served with unique public events. “It’s certainly a very highly engaged community with many interest groups for all ages.”

And, she says, youth volunteers, are easy to find and great to work with, pulling things together on the day.

Some fixtures like the summer Kids Athletic Series, have been running since well before her tenure. Hundreds can recall roll- ing up to have a go at running and jumping activities on late-summer afternoons at the North Shore Rugby Club grounds.

Similarly, the free preschool play sessions at Windsor Reserve and Bayswater Park have a long history, with as many as 60 parents and kids showing up at the Devonport session and around half that number in Bayswater.

Just through these two events, hundreds of parents and kids have had hours of fun and made strong connections with others. You can’t beat the value of that, says Teape.

But times are changing in the early-child- hood scene in the neighbourhood, she says. In the last five years, numbers coming to the play sessions have fallen.

“It’s a combination of things. Increasing numbers of women are returning to work earlier and there is more high-end childcare built. That, plus the fact that we’ve lost a lot of families with the big chunks of govern- ment housing that have gone.

“We’re yet to see what sort of change will happen with family demographics when the new housing is filled.”

Public feedback indicates the annual Halloween Trail down beside the Bayswater cemetery is up there among the peninsula’s most popular events. The last Halloween Trail attracted around 2000 people.

Teape says the trust can’t yet confirm whether the Halloween Trail will be on again this October, but admits it’s a favourite with her team and their volunteers.

“It’s pretty full-on, but it’s so much fun. We have to get down there and get it all set up pretty quickly in a very short space of time before the crowds show up. I know people love it.”

For now the scary critters are packed down flat in many boxes in a store room, looking very quiet and harmless. Word will come soon enough if they’re going to be busted out for more screams, shrieks and large-scale family fun.

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