A new digital service is making it easier than ever for people in Christchurch and Canterbury to reach out for help before things spiral into a crisis.

The Loft has rolled out secure tablets in libraries and trusted community spaces, giving people a private and low pressure way to access support. Since soft launching in March, more than 100 people have already connected with services through the new platform.

The Loft’s general manager Kate O’Grady said the service had been designed to break down the barriers that often stop people seeking help.

“The Loft, we’re a group of organisations based in Eastgate Mall, so we’re upstairs,” O’Grady said. “We are a collaborative community hub, so we have 15 partner agencies who work with us, and we also run a drop in crisis service. So anyone can walk in who has any social service need and they can come meet with the team and they’ll help them make a plan and get referred to all the correct agencies.”

She said the hardest part for most people was simply taking the first step.

“There’s lots of things from shame to not knowing what supports are there,” she said.

“When you look at needs such as things like gambling, it’s extremely hard for somebody to walk into a space and say ‘I’ve got a gambling problem’. The whole purpose of the Loft is about making you walk into one door that nobody knows what you’re walking in for. That removes some of those barriers, and this new project particularly being in libraries, being more available online, gives another access point for people.”

O’Grady said libraries were the natural choice for the tablets, given how central they already were in many people’s lives.

“Libraries are such a huge community asset. People are there for such a range of reasons,” she said.

“Particularly, we are next door to a library. Lynwood Library is next to us in the mall, and we have found over the past 10 years a huge amount of times people have been in the library, they’ve been upset, there’s been something happening in their lives, and they’ve been able to just walk them down to our team. So what we wanted to do is expand that for all the other libraries that don’t have us next door. Instead they can now guide people to these tablets where there are all these supports online, or people can then book in and meet with our team.”

The tablets are loaded with the Loft’s website and a wide range of resources, covering everything from family violence and housing to food insecurity.

“People can just scroll through and look up information themselves, and that can be anything around if they were in a family violence situation, if they’re looking for some housing supports, food insecurity, food banks. So they can just look at their own pace and try and find some information,” O’Grady said.

An AI chat function is also built into the site to help guide users.

“It will just guide you around the website. So if you ask it questions around your housing concerns or what’s happening for you, it will guide you to different parts of that website so you can get that information. But it will also say ‘leave your details, we’ll get in touch, have an appointment, you can come into the Loft, we can do it over the phone, we can do whatever works for you’,” she said.

“A lot of people might be fine just to look at it themselves. Some people might want that extra help to have someone guide them through what they can do next.”

The early uptake has highlighted just how much demand is out there.

“There is significant need out there and we’re seeing it constantly at the moment around financial instability, housing instability, a lot of people just needing basic resources, food, clothing,” O’Grady said.

“What we’re hoping is, we know the need is out there, and this is a way that we’re going to hopefully be able to get that support to more people than we’ve normally accessed.”

She said the tablets had an edge over a simple Google search because the resources were curated, local and accessible in a safe space.

“It’s a tablet that’s dedicated to helping people with the right resources. You don’t have to scroll through Google. You don’t have to be trying to look for what’s available. These tablets that are going to be in the libraries are easy to use. It’s for everybody and the services are at your fingertips,” she said.

Importantly, the library setting also offers privacy that some users may not have at home.

“For some people it might not be safe for them to look at things at home. They might not want to have these things in their search history. So it’s just somewhere private, somewhere dedicated that they can access,” O’Grady said.

“They also know it’s all localised help. They know it’s all Canterbury based. We have got supports in there for Selwyn and up in Waimakariri as well. They know it’s going to be something that isn’t just in Auckland or just in Wellington. It’s going to be stuff they can access here.”