LATEST STORIES
BestStart Mangere East give back
BestStart Mangere East is found in the heart of an amazing community in Mangere East. We pride ourselves int he hard work we do for our tamariki but also know there are daily struggles all our families meet everyday. Seeing a need in the community, the staff at BestStart Mangere East came up with an idea – a koha shed that the community can access whenever they are in need of something.
We wanted to call on all our Auckland BestStart centres to get involved by donating what they can from their communities in a way to give back to us, BestStart Mangere East put the call out for donations, clothes, homeware, toys, books, shoes, food – you name it we collected it!
What started as an idea for a small koha shed snowballed into a GIANT koha room complete with a free family fun day! with an open house, free entertainment, free food and so much fun for the children visiting.
The team got together and transformed one of the old classrooms into an amazing koha room filled to the brim of goodies to give out to the community for free, on top of that they also had a free bouncy castle, free face painting, a free sausage sizzle and cotton candy as well as an exciting visit from Marshall (Paw Patrol), Baby Shark and a Minion!
The positive connections to the community and our enrolled families made the whole day so special for all of us. Not only did we end up helping hundreds of people, we got to celebrate what makes South Auckland so special, seeing the generosity of so many.
The staff at BestStart Mangere East would like to thank the wonderful companies that helped us with this event including Imagine Face Painting, Children's Cartoon Character Entertainers, Blast Entertainment Hire Limited and our wonderful coffee man Frankie from Frankie's Mobile Espresso Bar – and of course our beautiful Mangere East community for coming out and showing us some aroha!