By Alison Robertson | Photos: Barker Photography
True Colours, winners of the Not for Profit category of this year’s Westpac Waikato Business Awards, are one of a kind. As they are not a hospice or specialist palliative care service there’s no other single organisation in New Zealand doing what True Colours does.
They take an all-encompassing approach to supporting children and young people with complex serious illness, and their families. They combine counselling, nursing and education and support services for the whole family, from diagnoses to cure or bereavement, and help people to adjust to living with a life-limiting illness.
True Colours was founded by Cynthia Ward 15 years ago and she remains its CEO with a staff of six: five clinicians along with two other contracted clinicians and executive communications assistant Michelle Rae. True Colours receives no central government funding, and is instead totally funded by the Waikato community. Over the years staff have worked with 2080 families and currently have a caseload of more than 200.
Offices are a house in Frankton, owned by fashion designer Annah Stretton, who brought it 14 years ago for the work of True Colours. It has counselling rooms, relaxing spaces, and in its basement a variety of therapy spaces for children including music, art, and sand rooms, toys and games.
True Colours entered the Waikato Business Awards in 2012 and made the finals. Ward says that experience highlighted areas where the organisation could improve. “The awards are helpful in that they enable you to step away from the day to day running of the organisation and consider the bigger picture,” she says.
In 2019, staff felt they were better equipped to enter the awards again. They’d strengthened their policies and procedures and while they’d always been well known in the health sector, they had strengthened their connections with businesses in the city and region, establishing partnerships with organisations such as Urban Homes and Northern Districts Cricket. “Standing up there on the stage at the awards, looking into the audience, I could see so many of the businesses that had been involved or are still involved in some way in supporting us,” Ward says.
“We now have people and businesses approaching us, to support us. And we need that: as our referrals have grown, our workloads have increased.”
Rae says they’re looking forward to reading the judges’ reports from this year’s awards, to gain an external perspective of the organisation, get some tangible feedback, perhaps identifying any gaps in their service delivery or ways they can deliver more efficiently. “As we’re the only organisation like this in the country, it’s often a case of learning as we go. We have had people from other regions coming to find out what we do, keen to establish something like True Colours.”
The organisation strives to be at the leading edge of care for children and their families so they place a lot of emphasis on professional development. At the same time staff are often called upon to talk to or assist others in the health and education sectors about the issues True Colours deals with every day. Ward doesn’t foresee any major changes in the near future. The focus is to keep on listening to what families say is important in their care and providing a service that best meets their needs.
