Tokelau Community Housing

The Tokelau community and the research team are working together to design and build demonstration healthy houses for extended-family living. A series of meetings are in process to talk through the community’s specific housing needs. These ideas form the requirements for the community – renovating one house and building a new house.

This project is the third stage of a research partnership that has been developed by researchers at the Wellington School of Medicine and the Wellington Tokelau Association to improve the health of the Wellington Tokelau community by increasing understanding of the links between housing and health and then acting on this information to improve the houses that Tokelau people live in. This stage of the project is co-funded by the Centre for Research Evaluation and Social Assessment and is built around a collaboration with architects from the Wellington School of Architecture and Design, Victoria University of Wellington.

In the first stage of the research we explored with key groups in the Wellington Tokelau community the concerns they held about their health in relation to housing. Seven focus groups were held with older men, older women, middle-aged men, middle-aged women, young people, professionals and sole parents. The key issues identified in these focus groups were then disseminated and incorporated into a questionnaire on health and housing which was administered to a random sample of the Wellington Tokelau community in the second stage of the research. There was a 85% response rate to the survey which we are presently analysing.

In the third stage of the research partnership we are focusing on the physical design of the houses. We are carrying out action-research, where researchers and members of the Wellington Tokelau community meet together in consultation with Housing New Zealand Corporation officials to consider the results from previous focus groups and the random survey and other available information.

The aim is to work together to refurbish an existing state house and to design an appropriate, affordable, sustainable, new, multi-family state house. We will evaluate the process by carrying out participant observation of the fono (meetings) and in-depth interviews of the participants. The new tenants of the extended family housing will also be interviewed, before and after they move in, to establish the appropriateness and acceptability of the designs.

Objectives

  1. To discuss the results of the focus groups and community survey with the Wellington Tokelau community in community meetings and ensure that their concerns about housing and health are incorporated into the design brief.
  2. To work with the Tokelau community, tenants, landlords and architects to refurbish an existing state house for an extended family that is health promoting and energy efficient.
  3. To involve the community in the building work in order to create employment in the community, to use the existing building skills in the community and to up-skill other members of the community.
  4. To carry out an in-depth process evaluation of the community-action programme.
  5. To qualitatively analyse the experience for extended families of being rehoused.