When you think of a library, you usually just picture a big room of books – but that only scratches the surface of what the Waitohi community hub at Johnsonville offers.

Read “Let Your Creativity Flow at Waitohi’s Makerspace” here

Many thanks to the Communications team at Wellington City Council for this piece on Tūhara HIVE Makerspace @ Waitohi Community Hub. Thanks also needs to go out to the team who is making all of this happen. If it wasn’t for these folks who knows what the space would be doing right now.

• Jamie and Hadleigh for their day to day support in running the space: you are the brains and the heart of the space. You keep it moving ahead and you keep it functioning. You are the two who make this space real for the community.
• Catherine, Sam, Mikaela, and everyone else or their moments of filling in at the space: you keep the place moving along, you’ve jumped in the deep end to learn about so much new stuff and to make sure the community has a great experience in Tūhura HIVE.
• Laurinda for her leadership guidance and support: thanks for letting us try so much new stuff, thank you for letting us fail and succeed and learn, and thank you for your patience with every new thing that comes onto our radar weekely.

It has been a really great learning experience for me to lead the team on this journey. I’ve learned a lot about what can and can’t be done, how to accomplish the bigger things, and how along the whole way to be patient. Tūhura HIVE as a space is just reaching the point where it needs to be and I am most excited to see it grow beyond that. Here are my three personal goals for the space over the next year or so:

• Continue to advocate for additional dedicated staffing at Tūhura HIVE. Right now we’re at 1.5 employees. We need to get 2.5 employees for it to properly work.
• Continue to support the staff working in the space: get the them tools they need, the raw materials they use, and help bring structure to the many facets of the services they offer to the community.
• Further establish Tūhura HIVE as a “mini-branch” in our library system that operates in its own unique way. This place isn’t just a room within a library branch; Tūhura HIVE is a specialized mini-branch library that just so happens to be inside a larger branch library. IT IS IT’S OWN THING