The Devonport Flagstaff Page 14
March 10, 2017
New faces ponder changes at community venues Brigid Curran and Challen Wilson started their new jobs as managers of the Devonport Community House and Belmont’s Rose Centre respectively on the same day; both have Gaelic names and neither of them is interested in sticking to the status quo. Curran is already thinking about “a bit of revamp” of the community house. “I want to bring people together, and work against loneliness and isolation,” she says. “I am not sure how connected people in Devonport really are. I want everyone to feel they can just come in here, if they are lost, isolated, whatever, and make themselves a cup of tea and chat,” she says. Until recently, Curran, who lives in Sunnynook, managed the Waitakere Women’s Centre, where she coordinated programmes on domestic violence. She is also a clairvoyant and has written two books on spirituality. “I am a bit out there,” she says. Wilson arrived at the Rose Centre during its leaky-building repairs. “I am surrounded by scaffolding, which gives me time to look ahead at the next financial year,” she says. It is the centre’s 25th anniversary and Wilson is thinking of ways to celebrate once the work is completed, which is expected to be by late April. Ultimately, she wants to “let fresh air in” and take the community theatre up a notch towards the professional level. Wilson trained as an actor and worked as a
Change of the guard... Devonport Community House manager Brigid Curran (left) and Rose Centre manager Challen Wilson playwright and producer in Wellington. She moved to Milford a year ago and has been working in systems communications. “I talked to computers every day. It’s nice to be coming back into the creative world,”
she says. But Wilson also sees how she can bring her computer experience to the new job and is planning to put a new booking and ticketing system in place. “It will save us so much time.”