Her active recreation career began straight out of high school, when she began volunteering for Scouts Aotearoa, and led to her gaining qualifications in youth work. Now she’s developing recreation programmes for West Wave Pool and Leisure Centre, building up relationships with the community and encouraging more people to use the space.

It hasn’t always been easy going, but Sarah loves doing it. “The centre has not had recreation term programmes running for a while and has just been focusing on after-school and holiday programmes… it takes a while for things to happen when you’re starting from scratch.” Sarah now has a couple of term programmes up and running, including a sports skills programme where people learn a variety of sports and coordination skills, and she’s hoping to launch a similar programme for preschoolers in the near future.

For centres like hers, community buy-in is essential. “It takes a little bit of time,” Sarah explains, but her patience and focus on the end goal of a rich programme offering is paying off. As more programmes become available, the centre is often getting both email and walk-in enquiries about what’s coming up next and when enrolments for the current offerings open.

Alongside her work at the centre, Sarah has been completing a qualification in sport and recreation programme delivery with us. While signing up for it, she thought it would be an easy way to give some backing to her years of experience in the sector – so she was pleasantly surprised at the knowledge and new perspective she gained. “I actually learnt heaps. Even though I’ve been doing this for ages, I learnt heaps, and it gives me the motivation to continue in this path and to continue with my own personal and professional development.”

Now that she’s finished her qualification, her current goal is to create a youth programme within her centre in a similar vein to the youth hangout spaces at other centres around Auckland Council’s recreation department. Sarah hopes to collaborate with a nearby youth space that offers its own hangout options. “I want to work with them and see if we can make some sort of programme to help develop them and get to where they want to go. They’ve got the community, and we’ve got the space.”

She says her experience has also given her a renewed motivation to provide for her community and to help Auckland Council’s recreation department plan for the future. “The centre is an asset to the community,” Sarah says, “and there is so much we can do.”