Methodist Mission Southern’s vision is of a safe, caring, and sustainable society where every citizen is valued and respected, and enjoys an equal opportunity to lead a fulfilled life.
We deliver a broad range of evidence-based services to people of all ages, throughout Otago and Southland. Our social and educational services aim to develop skills and build resilience in every person we work with – to create meaningful, long-lasting changes for themselves, their whānau and their communities.
We are committed to strengthening our partnerships with Māori, improving our bicultural practices across our entire organisation, and using our skills and resources to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi and support positive outcomes for Māori.
Our Work
Our current work includes; early childhood services, self-regulation and oral language programmes, youth transition housing, client support services, speech-language communication support, prison-based education, literacy and numeracy programmes, parenting programmes, driver licence training, and capability building initiatives for other social service providers.
We are constantly looking to improve the quality of our work, and our Innovation Lab is responsible for the design, development and testing of new initiatives – including play-based approaches for improving children’s life course outcomes, virtual reality education tools for prison-based learners, transitional housing models for young people, new practice models for supporting individuals and whānau to achieve their goals, and innovative uses of data to gain insights into issues and opportunities for clients, measure outcomes, and improve service delivery across the social sector.
The implementation of high quality science in real world settings is also a high priority across all of our services – working in partnership with the scientific community, philanthropic funders, commercial partners and policy experts to ensure that evidence-based approaches to wellbeing are made available, at a large scale, to the people with the most to gain from this knowledge.
Our work is funded and supported by a variety of organisations and individuals, including several Government agencies, philanthropic funders, small grants providers, and a number of individual donors.
Methodist Mission Southern has been working to improve social outcomes since 1890, and we remain committed to our purpose statement:
Change That Works: enough support and challenge for you to risk a better future.
