How a house burglar led to one of Tauranga’s most effective charities

When Campbell Hill put his hand up to mentor the teen who broke into his house, an idea was born. Photo / Andrew Warner
When Campbell Hill’s house was burgled for the second time in a fortnight back in 2012, the Tauranga local found himself face to face with one of the teenagers responsible.
“We ended up at a family group conference, and there was lots of arguing,” he told Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night.
“I just put my hand up in the middle and said, ‘I’m not too sure what the answer is for these young guys, but I need to mentor them’. Everyone said ‘You can’t mentor them, you’re a victim’.
“And I said, ‘Well if that was my son, someone [would] need to mentor him – and I’m putting my hand up’.”
Eventually, the authorities agreed, and the 17-year-old was given 50 community hours with Hill.
The problem was, though, the youngster wasn’t showing up when he was scheduled to. So Hill took matters into his own hands – with the help of some divine intervention.
“I was driving home one day and I thought to myself, ‘I’m really looking forward to dinner’. And this voice came straight to me, ‘Yes, but your friend isn’t.’ And I stopped the car and I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’” he told Real Life.
“The thought came to me to go to Bethlehem Baptist Church, get a food parcel, and take it around to his family. So that’s what I did.”
When he arrived, Hill says, he overheard the boy and his mother arguing about no food being in the house.
“As you can imagine, that was like ‘Whoa, this is an opportune moment’. And so I called them over, his mum hugged me, and we ended up taking the food into the house. And as we’re in the kitchen, I opened the doors to put the food in and realised there wasn’t even salt and pepper.”
As the teen worked with him and began to open up about his struggles, Hill told Cowan seeing his need locally “opened up the community” to him.
“I thought, there are heaps of needs in my community, I’ve just got to open my eyes a little bit to see – and respond in some way.”
What was born from that encounter was Good Neighbour, a community support charity that provides practical help and key connections with the community.
It now boasts six separate community initiatives – including a food rescue that saves 2.5 tonnes of groceries a day that would otherwise go to waste, redistributing them to those in need; neighbourhood projects that help with backyard clean-ups; and a kitchen that educates people about how to use food on hand to create nutritious meals.
They also have a depot that distributes 500 cubic metres of firewood each winter, a community garden that enables people to grow and harvest fresh fruit and vegetables, and a care team that helps people with budgeting, applications and getting people into work, as well as offering social connection.
Hill says he and the team at Good Neighbour have adopted an attitude of “if we can make it happen, let’s do it”.
“One of the things early on that I began to recognise is that often we would go through life with blinkers on – and we don’t actually see or stop long enough to see what the needs are.
“We just began to do that, and to have some intentionality and a little bit of courage to really make that kind of a difference.”
Hill says anyone can do what he has.
“When I was living in my street, the Mongrel Mob moved in just two doors up from me. And I thought to myself, after six weeks, this is no good, we haven’t welcomed them to the neighbourhood.
“So I asked my wife to bake me a cake and I went and caught a trout and smoked it up. I took it up to them, knocked on the door and got a reasonable but gruff response. And the next day as I stood at my driveway, a car went past, and they waved out to me.
“I thought to myself, you know what, I can’t change what they do, or what they stand for, or any of that kind of stuff – but I can change the climate in my street. And that really made a huge difference, just that act of kindness.”
Hill says his founding of Good Neighbour was borne out of his strong Christian faith, which he says calls him to do good for “the least of these”.
“I’d been brought up in church circles for a long time, and I really wanted this to be an expression of what I believed. I really feel that the message the Church should be bringing to our community really is around service, and it is around the needy.
“I look at it like a carpet. When a carpet frays, there’s all these threads. And so it’s kind of our role to go to where things are breaking down and to weave back in – weave our energy and resources.
“That’s what I believe we’re called to do, as well as love God, is to love people, love your neighbour – that’s the big thing. You can’t separate that. And so I just wanted to bring that back into focus again, because the social side of things is sometimes lacking.”
Real Life is a weekly interview show where John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing, and the way they see the world. Tune in Sundays from 7.30pm on Newstalk ZB or listen to the latest full interview here.