‘For locals, by locals’ is a motto used by Achievement House for many years, and it’s exemplified by a recent generous donation from the Lindsay Foundation.
The foundation was established by the Lindsay family after the 2016 sale of the successful manufacturing company Sistema Plastics, a business that grew from humble beginnings in the early 1980s, working out of a garage in Cambridge.
The Lindsay Foundation’s mission is to support Kiwi individuals and organisations who aspire to make a positive difference in New Zealand.
Areas of focus for their support include disabilities, health, children and animal welfare.
In early 2024, the foundation made a significant donation to Achievement House to help support our disability enterprise model of employment support.
“We are very proud and pleased to join the list of organisations they support to do good work in our community,” general manager Neil Fynn said.
Achievement House started in 1976 as a sheltered workshop, also working from a garage on Shakespeare St until it moved to its current site at 13 Wilson St in the mid-1980s.
“We now operate as a Disability Enterprise with the primary purpose to create and provide employment opportunities for disabled persons,” Neil Fynn said.
Achievement House and its staff team have become specialists in the assembling, collating, packaging, and labelling of components for industries that outsource work to them.
The work usually deals with small, lightweight and easy-to-handle plastic or metal items that require a manual process to deliver the product to the customers’ requirements and quality control standards.
“We are well capable of doing runs of 30,000 items or more and work across a variety of industries,” Fynn said.
“Providing this work also creates natural opportunities for our staff to make and maintain social connections and relationships both at work and in the community.
“By the nature of our work, we find ourselves doing a lot of pastoral and social work support for people needing assistance to navigate many and varied out-of-work issues that impact them.
“Even seemingly minor disruptions caused by out-of-work issues can easily affect people’s ability to engage in work, so they need to be addressed.
“This is where a donation such as from the Lindsay Foundation allows us the flexibility to go over and above purely workday issues to provide social and pastoral supports to disabled people and their whanau and family to help them in their chosen lifestyles.”
Being contracted by Government ministries to provide disability support helps, but with the funding provided on a contributory funding basis, it is not sufficient to cover Achievement House’s needs.
“This requires us to reach out to our wider community for support for grants and donations, and we are always humbled by the generosity of those who understand and encourage what we do,” Fynn said.
“As a service, we have no intention of spreading our reach to other areas and regions; we focus on service, consistency, reliability, and stability. We aim for quality improvement rather than for size or region growth.
“We intend to continue offering work-focused disability support to locals, by locals in Cambridge for another 50 years and more.”
More about the Lindsay Foundation
Learn more about the Lindsay Foundation and its work here:
He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tāngata! He tāngata! He tāngata!
What is the most important thing in the world? It is the people! It is the people! It is the people!
