Dr Lovely Dizon
Visionwest Waka Whakakitenga is a Baptist-founded provider of services based in West Auckland. Founded in 1982 in the disused Glen Eden Railway Station, and then called ‘The Friendship Centre Trust, the organisation has gone to support thousands of whānau with food, counselling, budgeting services, housing, in-home care, and has led the social service sector with it’s strong kaupapa Māori and shared leadership journey. With services now spreading across Auckland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Rotorua, Taupō and Canterbury, Visionwest provides support and manaaki to whānau across the nation every single day.
Dr Lovely Dizon is Visionwest’s Research and Evaluation Advisor. With her doctoral research in mixed-methods grounded theory, she brings a deeply engaged and thoughtful lens to the work done at Visionwest.
NZCCSS is proud to have Visionwest Waka Whakakitenga as a member living their values in communities around the country, and I am grateful to Dr Lovely for writing this piece, Visionwest’s Chief Information Officer Andrew Fraser for facilitating it, and to Grant Taylor (also of Visionwest and my Older Persons Member Committee) for finding such a wonderful contributor to remind us of the responsibilities of working with people’s data.
– Rachel
At Visionwest Waka Whakakitenga, we seek to align everything we do with our values of aroha, mana, whānaungatanga and manaakitanga. We believe that this extends not only to our community facing work, but our back office support teams as well. For Visionwest, data is a taonga (treasure) provided by whānau (clients), staff, suppliers and/or generated by our kaimahi (workers). To be good kaitiaki (guardians, stewards) of this data is of the highest priority. At Visionwest, our Data Governance Policy outlines how we care for the information provided to us throughout the entire data lifecycle, and It provides an important foundation for how we continue to sharpen our practices. Our approach is to continuously improve our practices and systems for how we collect, manage, analyse, and report data; respecting the emerging and best practice standards for information use, storage and protection.
One example of Data Innovation is our current Outcomes Framework work. Our organisation’s vision is: ‘He Oranga Tāngata, He Oranga Hapori – in all we do, we endeavour to reflect the values we believe lead to empowerment and transformation for whānau.’ Currently, the evidence of the full extent of transformation for client whānau is often anecdotal and not well captured. Yet, there is a desire within Visionwest to have more rigorous and in-depth information (regarding the changes we hear whānau sharing with us), that is not currently systematically gathered at present. This led Visionwest’s Insights and Analytics team to commission a Outcomes Framework project, led by our Research and Evaluation Advisor. The Outcomes Framework aims to describe the outcomes individuals and whānau may experience through engaging with Visionwest services. To ensure our outcome framework reflects whānau experiences at Visionwest, we held multiple focus groups with whānau.
Prior to collecting any information from whānau, we chose to apply for formal ethics approval through Aotearoa Research Ethics Committee (AREC). A process that assessed the purpose of data collection, consent procedures, privacy protections, potential risks and benefits for participants and data storage and management. Whilst time consuming, undertaking this process ensured that our work with whānau on this project was conducted in an ethically sound manner.
For us, the time and resource spent to this end, was worth it. We remain deeply committed to working with data in a way that is integrally joined to our work for the empowerment and transformation of the whānau we serve.
