ABSTRACT
For several years of the 1970s I lived in the small New Zealand town of Feilding. Located in the Manawatu region of New Zealand’s North Island, Feilding had a population of about 10,000 people and the officer in charge of the local police station was Senior Sergeant Stewart Belcher. I got to know Stewart quite well mainly through playing golf. Such social interactions led to Stewart expressing concerns about people who had problems but lacked support. At Stewart’s prompting and in association with him and several others, I then became instrumental in setting up a social support centre for people with problems of any sort. Both Stewart and the rest of us were supported in this action by Feilding’s then mayor, G.H. Corrick. At that time there was no formal social support of this nature available locally so this support centre was designed to be inclusive – it was independent of any group that may consciously or unconsciously seek to provide any form of political or religious influence to those they helped. We established it with the intention that it was run by the local community in premises supplied by the local council.
