From Frontline to Top Job

DCM has a new CEO, but it’s a very familiar face. Natalia Cleland started at DCM as a social worker, and now, to the delight of all, she’s been appointed to the top role of Manahautū.

On Natalia Cleland’s first day as a duty social worker at DCM in January 2017, Regina – who now leads DCM’s Aro Mai Housing First team ­– smiled at her and said, “You’re going to be the director one day.”

Eight years later, Natalia is doing just that.

“I don’t know what Regina saw that day,” Natalia says, laughing. “Maybe it was my youthful energy, my sense of hopefulness?” Quite likely that, as well as her kindness, sense of service, and perfect fit with DCM’s values. They’re attributes Natalia holds onto even after eight years working in what’s surely one of Wellington’s toughest jobs. And they’re forces that continue to drive her in the organisation’s mission to make the right to housing a fully accepted – and funded ­– human right.

Natalia’s been the Acting Manahautū, or Chief Executive, since Stephen Turnoch stepped down in May, and her path to confirmation was hardly a confidential process. “Everyone from taumai, to staff, to contacts in the wider sector asked me if I was applying. I’d been quite open that, yes, I was, so I had people constantly asking if I’d heard yet. I didn’t know the announcement email had gone out until Regina came up with tears in her eyes and gave me a big hug.”

It's a warmth Natalia has felt since she started at DCM, full of awe for the work the kaimahi, its staff, did – an awe that’s only grown over the years. Natalia had moved to Wellington from Whanganui in 2004 to get a social work degree. She then worked at Oranga Tamariki for nine years, moving to the Chief Social Worker’s Office.

Keen to get back into frontline social work, she’d cut her hours down to four days a week, volunteering at an NGO to dip her toe back in to frontline work. Then a job advertisement for DCM caught her eye. “The ad said something like, ‘Are you somebody who's ready and willing to roll up your sleeves and do what it takes to support the most marginalised in Wellington?’ I just knew this was the kind of work I wanted to do.

“We still have those words in the job ad because it's a true and accurate representation of this work – it’s ‘roll up your sleeves and get stuck in, nothing's too big or too small’. This is hard work – we work for the people others are not able to, or willing to, engage with.”

It’s also incredibly rewarding, Natalia says. “Especially in those days as a duty social worker, it felt like every day I did something immediately tangible to help someone take a step towards greater wellbeing. Maybe it was something big, like getting them into their own whare, or maybe it was small but consequential, like getting someone some ID or helping them fill out an application.”

After only a year, Natalia was tapped to set up Toro Atu, DCM’s Outreach Service. Leading that team gave her even more opportunities to create immediate impact by connecting with people sleeping rough or street begging, and encouraging them to engage with DCM.

As DCM still works with about 1200 people a year, and as funding retracts and housing issues increase, Natalia knows her new role won’t be easy. “We work with people in very challenging situations, for whom good outcomes are few and far between,” she says. “And the work is absolutely not done. As a country we still do not see housing as a human right for all people. We have a large number of men and women sleeping on the street, as current policy settings exclude them from housing because of their addictions. “As a country, we still see addiction as someone's fault. That’s got to change. For me, a goal is for us to start talking about addiction as the health issue it is. DCM has already done a lot of work in this area, so I’m picking up the mantle, the legacy people before me have left.”

As she picks up that legacy, Natalia sees her strengths as being still young and aspirational – “not yet worn out by the system” ­– and that she brings a newness, while still coming from within the sector. She’s also equally comfortable when talking to taumai on the streets and in Te Hapai, or to politicians and CEOs at cocktail events.

“I enjoy building genuine relationships with key decision-makers. It’s important to have good stories about what's happening on the ground, alongside robust data. I want to solidify national recognition of our work so policy makers and media and people in strategic positions come to us to get the truth, to ask for our opinions and solutions.”

Again, thinking about legacy, Natalia feels and takes strength from the hopefulness of the people who started DCM, then called the Inner City Ministry, more than five decades ago.

"As a Christian, I have hope for the people we work with beyond the physical realm. When I think about the church members who set this organisation up in 1969, I know they would have been praying for the leaders at the time, and for all those to come. I feel encouraged to know I was in their prayers and that this DCM whakapapa holds me up. It's pretty special."