CNSST Foundation (formerly known as Chinese New Settlers Services Trust) offers culturally and linguistically appropriate social services, education and social housing to Asian and the wider community in New Zealand.
Social Work and Counselling Services (SWCT) of CNSST provides professional, confidential and holistic support to our Asian whānau experiencing/witnessing family violence or sexual violence.
For the initial 3 years, CNSST operated at Jenny’s home garage without any external funding. Now the organisation has developed to a medium-size NGO serving more than 15,000 local Asian migrants per annum by a professional and cohesive team including 38 paid staff, 100+ contracted tutors or counsellors, and over 50 long-term volunteers.
CNSST provides wraparound services by its five teams:
- Social work & counselling team, annually serving over 249 individuals and families and running community parenting programmes for over 500 local young parents;
- Employment & enterprise team, annually serving over 717 job seekers with over 397 successful job placements;
- Education & settlement team, annually serving over 500 newcomers with settlement support and over 1600 youths and community participants into cultural and art programmes;
- Korean community services team, annually serving over 200 Korean families;
- Social enterprise team, annually serving over 2000 elderly through Senior Mutual Support Network as well as weekly educating over 1500 young students at CNSST Cultural Learning Centre.
As a professional service provider, CNSST has been approved and certified as below:
- In 2002: Approved by CYFNZ as a service provider to the local Asian community, mainly Chinese, Korean and other Asian migrant communities, e.g. Cambodian and Vietnamese migrants;
- In 2010: Approved by NZICA as an ATO;
- In May 2013: Approved by NZQA as a PTE;
- In July 2013: Approved by SHU as a social housing provider;
- In Nov 2013: Approved by China Government as the Overseas Chinese Language Teaching Model School;
- In 2015: Approved by China Government as the Overseas Chinese Service Centre.
In the long term, CNSST aims to be developed as an Asian community hub to provide services to the local Asian minority communities in a holistic approach, as well as to develop it to be a successful social enterprise.