Take 10: A safe space for youngsters spending the night in Auckland city centre

Youngsters spending time in central Auckland at night now have a safe space to hang out before heading home.

After a 10-week successful trial, Vulnerable Support Charitable Trust decided to run Take 10, a safe space in the city.

The trust's operations manager Leigh Keown, who runs Take 10, says it was initially set up in Wellington to offer a range of services for different people.

“We saw the need for, you know, young people who’d go out in the city and they perhaps had been evicted from a bar or they were underage or too intoxicated to get into a bar and there was nowhere really for them to be to wait for their friends or to try and get home safely.”

Take 10 has phone chargers, drinking water, beanbags, games, medical support and help for people struggling to find their way home, and provides a safe meeting point in the city centre.

“We’re just there to look after people,” says Keown.

Waitematā local board chair Alexandra Bonham says they reached out to Take 10 as “there were some concerns around students’ safety late at night.”

She says that although the 10-week pilot was funded by the city centre targeted rate, the service is now being funded by a local crime fund that the Government gave to the Auckland Council to distribute.

The total fund was $2 million, of which Take 10 was allocated $100,908 to fund the service’s continuation this year.

Bonham says that when the funding comes to an end, the Waitematā local board will advocate to continue initiatives that promote student safety in the city centre.

“I don’t know whether we’ll get another funding stream like that, so we’ll just continue advocating for student wellbeing.”

Wellington student Poppy Herron says she used Take 10’s services when she was out in town with a friend who had a little too much to drink.

“We went over to the Take 10, we got her some water and just some sweets and some little carby bits to help her feel a little bit better and had a sit down.”

She says every time she walks past Take 10, the environment has been “pretty positive.”

“It’s always just been a lot of really, just friendly, nice people, they’re not super pushy, they’re just kind of there if you need them.”

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Our journalists sometimes use AI tools which are checked by humans for accuracy. 

AI was used to transcribe audio from the interview.