A win for Victory

January 30, 2010
It used to be the place the rest of Nelson avoided. Now it is held up as an example to the rest of New Zealand of what a community can aspire to.
Geoff Collett looks at the transformation of Victory
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EVEN if you arrive in the heart of Victory Square with a lifetime supply of traditional Nelson prejudices - the sort that will have you nervously keeping an eye on your parked car, the passers- by, those tough looking dudes coming out of the bar - you'll be hard-pressed to miss the evidence that, these days, you're in a place that rates itself.
The notice stuck to various windows and noticeboards around the square's shopping centre speaks volumes: a message to the locals, urging them to get behind the bid to have Victory named New Zealand's "community of the year" in a nationwide competition. It seems to have worked, too: Victory has made it to the final three and will find out next Wednesday night whether it has indeed seized the title.
Other signs are there, too. The newly painted mural on the side of the convenience store; the flyers and newsletters listing free services at the local community centre; the general absence of tagging, litter, vandalism; the air of a place that is, you could say, comfortable in its own skin.
On the edge of the shopping centre there's a pocket-sized cafe, opened last year, funky in the fashion familiar in inner-suburb cafes everywhere, steadily busy on a mid-week morning.
Nelson journalist and Victory resident Matt Lawrey - a relatively new arrival in the neighbourhood and among its many boosters - likes to point out that, years ago, the cafe premises were a butcher's shop, later a sex shop. That history, he suggests, could serve as a microcosm of the wider area's evolution, from its earlier days as a solid, unfashionable working-class suburb; to its 1990s-early-2000s period as a vaguely seedy part of town with a dodgy reputation; to now, a place that reckons it is worthy of being known as New Zealand's community of the year.
Over at the community centre off Totara St - part of the Victory Primary School campus - community activist Kindra Douglas also singles out the cafe to make a point. "I've noticed a lot of different people coming into the community now to go to that cafe, people who would have never dreamed of coming to Victory for a social experience, " she says, and laughs.
Then again, most Nelsonians should have twigged long before the cafe came along that things were happening in Victory. It has been hard to avoid the feelgood stories coming out of the place over the past half-dozen years, as a group of local champions have laboured to reverse its history of hardships.
It's getting to the point, Ms Douglas says, where "a lot of people say, 'everything that's going on is happening in Victory' ".
And she muses that it's also getting to the point where there is the risk that "outsiders looking in will just turn it around and do the tall poppy thing on us".
A decade ago, talking about tall poppies and Victory in the same breath would have been absurd. The 1990s were hard on the place. Gang associates and crime families were established there. Poverty and poor housing kept the neighbourhood depressed. It had the city's highest crime rate, suffered disproportionate vandalism, petty crime, burglary.
Families came and went, moving on when their problems caught up with them. At Victory Primary School, they tell of how in the mid-1990s, more than half the school roll turned over in a year, as children arrived then left with their transient parents. (Today, the turnover is less than one in 10).
And hanging over the whole place was the plan to drive the city's southern link highway extension through the middle of the community.
Wander around Emano or Murphy streets today - both once notorious Nelson addresses, to some minds, anyway - you would struggle to reconcile the old infamy with today's reality. There are still some rough- looking places, some overgrown gardens. But virtually no tagging. No car wrecks. No hordes of shiftless youth, or menacing apprenticed thugs.
What's changed is obvious. But how? Ms Douglas's favoured phrase is "a perfect storm". "There was this convergence of a number of different things at the right time, " she says - people, ideas, opportunities, needs - starting around 2000. Among the early pioneers were Mark Brown, the principal at Victory Primary, and Briar Maaroufi, who determined that the place needed a low- or no-cost community health centre and launched the long, often frustrating campaign to get one (she died before her dream was realised).
John O'Donovan - the community constable from March 2000 until late 2005 - was another pivotal figure. Determined to convince people to raise their own standards, he ran numerous schemes, whether helping people get their driving licences so they wouldn't be caught driving illegally; convincing youngsters not to tag their own neighbourhoods; or convincing Nelson City Council to act quicker to clear away the car wrecks being dumped there with depressing frequency.
Then, in 2004, the community helped dash the roading authorities' plan to build the southern link, with the Environment Court tossing the plan out because of the effect it would have on life in Victory. Kindra Douglas sees that as a watershed, convincing the locals that their community had a better future.
The property market played a part, too. As house prices soared everywhere, rents started climbing and, Mr O'Donovan, the large number of drug users living in Victory moved away.
With Victory still offering cheap housing by Nelson standards, new homeowners started coming in, with "a desire to put in gardens and paint their houses", as he puts it.
The suburb hasn't exactly been gentrified, but there's an entirely different atmosphere.
"Massively different, " he says. "It's unbelievably so. People are ecstatic about living there, they say they wouldn't live anywhere else, they like the fact that there is a huge camaraderie and that people know their neighbours."
The crime rate has plummeted.
Ms Douglas says the rise in property prices and rents has caused some consternation among those who fear poorer families will be driven out; but she acknowledges that Victory still is - and probably always will be - a place of cheaper housing, much of it tucked into cold valleys and hillsides. It is still a working-class community, popular with beneficiaries, far more ethnically varied than most of the city. And if that feeds a lingering stigma in other suburbs, a more worldly view of the community has developed over recent years.
It's not hard to find recent arrivals who tell of being warned off moving there by old Nelsonians, but they have just as likely ignored the advice.
Mike Hindmarsh could be typical of the newcomers: a furniture maker with a young family, who moved to Murphy St a couple of years ago, in part attracted by the school, who is if anything bemused by Victory's rough reputation. Even before he moved there, it never struck him as being a particularly scary part of town - to the contrary, "there's a lot of young families around here - the kids have got a lot of playmates, and it's safe".
He has demonstrated his enthusiasm for the neighbourhood by getting himself on to the local community association; he shares what he says is a growing desire around the place among the various artists and younger people living there to "funkify" the suburb, to get more community facilities designed to reflect Victory's particular identity.
But if you're looking for the one place where Victory's turning point can be traced back to, you'll surely start, and stop, at the school.
Mark Brown notched up his 20th anniversary there last year (and his 15th in the principal's office); his connections go back even further, to a stint he had there as a beginner teacher. It may not have been everyone's idea of a dream job, but for Mr Brown, "even though it was seen to be a challenge, it fitted my own educational idea about making a difference for people". He never saw a lost cause. "It always had a strong underlying spirit."
His core philosophy sounds simple enough - insisting that families were central to the development of their children - but he had a task on his hands putting that into effect.
The story of Victory Primary's steady progress under Mr Brown's management has been well documented and has attracted attention far and wide (including from the likes of Prime Minister John Key and the Families Commission, which has been studying the Victory approach).
In short, one thing led to another. First came earning the parents' and community's trust. Parents started interacting with the school and taking a closer interest. Other agencies that needed to build ties with the people of Victory started to base themselves at the school. The ripples spread.
"We had people working all over the place, in interview rooms and converted toilet spaces and cloakbays. But it wasn't about the facilities, but about the relationships they were building, " Mr Brown says.
As the demand intensified the school stepped up even further. In need of a new hall itself, it convinced the education authorities that it could go into deeper partnership with the community and build a new wing that would include not just a hall but meeting rooms and offices to serve the rapidly growing line-up of support agencies operating from the school, including a community health centre. The result was the Victory Community Centre, headquarters to Ms Douglas and her colleagues. But the building is only part of it: the school has numerous facilities it freely shares with the public, including a community garden, a hangi pit, sport courts and play equipment. It is the hub around which Victory's renaissance revolves.
Mr Brown sees room for the school to do yet more. "We've certainly set our sights and our expectations far higher than what they were five years ago, " he says. "We now know that there's another realm of things that we can still enhance the school into."

He has stacks of reports and statistics to prove the validity of Victory's approach. One he is especially proud of is that 90 per cent of Victory's 400-odd pupils meet or better benchmark standards in reading, writing and numeracy - far better than the norm for such a low socio- economic area.
Like Kindra Douglas, Mr Brown sees a risk that Victory's success could yet backfire, if funding agencies decide it is has had its fair share. Ms Douglas estimates the community centre relies on about 20 different funding sources. She hopes that the strength of their relationships - and the growing evidence that Victory people are embracing the opportunities now being offered them - are enough to protect such arrangements.
There are other threats, surely none greater than the prospect that the southern link could yet be revived.
That raises a crucial point about the Victory story: that it is not just a hunger for publicity that makes the community's boosters so eager to keep the outside world informed of their progress. They understand the politics of community activism, they know that the more sympathy they can call on around Nelson and beyond, the harder it will be to ever build a highway through the heart of Victory. As Matt Lawrey wrote in his Nelson Mail column a couple of weeks ago, what politician would want to claim credit for building the southern link through the "community of the year"?
And it's an on-going challenge. For despite all the undoubted progress, and even if you go along with the view that Emano St is no longer such a bad address, there are still those who see Victory's greatest value to the city as the route for a four-lane expressway. As long as that attitude exists, you can expect to keep hearing the people of Victory telling you another story.
"We want to keep creating a counter-reality, that it's a beautiful place in its own right, " Ms Douglas says.
And if that means getting political, so be it.
"We see ourselves living and breathing as a political act in its own way - for daring to do something like this."