Volunteering our tech skills at Te Puea Marae

Located in South Auckland, Te Puea Memorial Marae has opened its doors as a safe haven for the homeless of Auckland. Focused on helping families, children and the elderly, the marae has stepped up to help social services tackle Auckland’s homelessness crisis. From sleeping in cars and garages, the Manaaki Tangata program seeks to help families into temporary or permanent housing. 

In the winter of 2016, Te Puea helped place 130 families in homes, thanks to the efforts of 1,200 volunteers. As they prepared to do the same in 2017, a group of individuals from Auckland’s tech community, including Aerorock, stepped in to upgrade the marae’s infrastructure.

Access to the Internet and computers is an essential way of helping these families reach the resources they need – but it can be daunting for the average person to even set up a router, let alone build a whole network from scratch. Te Puea had enough on their plates already and are doing a fantastic job, so we were happy to offer our expertise.

We’d refurbished several laptops for the residents and social support staff to use. There are endless forms to fill out and resumes to write – all they have to do is run Office, so you don’t need flash kit! Even on these old machines, patching through Windows Update to keep everything secure is the most important part… with help from the smallest, furriest member of the team.

Creating a working wireless network from a pile of random donated gear was a challenge! Some of the donated machines were a real blast from the past…

Getting useable WiFi across the offices, family rooms and kitchen was a challenge. We wired up several access points, cobbling together a hardy little network that does the job! As all the equipment was donated, we had a lot of fun hacking it together and making it work. It’s one thing to design and build the perfect solution, but sometimes working with what you can find is just as satisfying.

By the end of the weekend we had gone from cluttered storerooms full of donations, no Internet, and a handful of random computers to working Internet access for staff, residents and guests, an office setup with laptops for social services to guide families to the resources they need, and several exhausted geeks!

It can sometimes be easy to overlook that IT is actually about helping people – yes, we have fun playing with fancy kit and making cool things, but our job is to make everything invisible so you can get on with your mission. Our goal was to sort all the infrastructure at Te Puea so they can focus on the amazing charitable work they do. The team at Aerorock are incredibly proud to have been a part of this and wish Te Puea all the best.