Common Goals, Community Outcomes with Kāinga Ora

From left: Ākina General Manager, Rochelle Wallens, Ākina CEO, Nicola Nation, Ākina head of partnerships and Senior consultant, Investment Tan Huynh and Ākina Impact Associate, Kristin Fanselow

Kāinga Ora are leaders in Social Procurement, actively using their investment and buying decisions to make environmental, social and economic impact. 

Partnering with construction company Icon to deliver the Greys Avenue project — an innovative 276 apartment complex in central Auckland — Kāinga Ora was committed to providing broad social outcomes including: 

  • Help boost employment and training opportunities

  • Grow Māori and Pasifika businesses

  • Support worker wellbeing

  • Minimise environmental impact

  • Foster a positive relationship with the community

Ākina worked with Kāinga Ora to help them identify the social and environmental impact they were achieving through their progressive procurement activities, and map this to their organisational purpose.

“We are driving impact to help communities, and in turn delivering more skilled workers, which helps with the underlying goal of building more houses.”

Dallas Paotonu, Former Manager Strategic Social Procurement
Kāinga Ora

With many competing initiatives across the organisation, there was an opportunity to take an outcomes focus that demonstrated their impact and helped guide their investment decisions.  

Together, we developed an impact model using the project to help us understand the progressive procurement activities already taking place, and the environmental and social outcomes achieved. 

We supported them to refresh their Progressive Procurement Framework (Pā Harakeke) to have more of an impact focus and worked with them to identify upcoming projects with which to integrate impact measurement and organisational change requirements. 

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