Elyjana Roach is reflecting on the flight she took from Wellington to Auckland for her Keystone Study Award interview.
“I was extremely grateful to be welcomed into a legacy that has really changed people’s lives. Keystone has been a huge part of building exposure, confidence and connections.”
“It felt grand,” she says: “It was a daunting, exciting opportunity to talk about a profession I knew nothing about.” That profession was architecture – something the Tawa College head girl had determined to pursue from an early age.
Elyjana has delivered on her resolve. The recently-appointed director of community regeneration, masterplanning and design at the Central Pacific Collective is an architect and urban designer with a fundamental commitment to her Porirua birthplace and its people. Although she has fiercely maintained a local presence throughout her life, she has combined it with an international perspective: after leaving the University of Victoria with a Masters degree in Architecture, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, which saw her further her architectural studies in urban design at Harvard University. She graduated at the top of her class and received a prestigious travelling fellowship.
Elyjana went on to work as an instructor in urban design at Harvard, and then at a practice in New York City, designing for the American west. The work was interesting and incredibly fun, she says. But something was missing.
She realised she did not know the people she was designing for. “I said ‘this is not my community.’ [The overseas experience] broadened my perspective but also narrowed my focus. For me, there’s no deeper, more meaningful way to serve than serving my own community.”
Elyjana came home to Porirua, where she and her two younger siblings had been raised by their pastor parents, and cemented a role with the Central Pacific Collective. Her new position is the ideal fit: CPC is a community-led organisation focused on enabling thriving, resilient and prosperous Pasefika communities.
As a member of the executive leadership team, she is now overseeing the project Our Whare Our Fale, the first significant project between Mana Whenua, Ngāti Toa, and Tangata Pasefika, which aims to build up to 300 homes of affordable housing, with wellbeing the underlying ethic.
This sits with her long-held sense of social justice. (In her original Keystone application, Elyjana described herself as ‘a dedicated young adult against poverty and injustice.’)
“For me, the local context has the biggest potential. And my community and my culture has the richest potential,” she says.
Keystone has made so much of this possible. “I was extremely grateful to be welcomed into a legacy that has really changed people’s lives. Keystone has been a huge part of building exposure, confidence and connections.” Those links extend beyond the workplace. Elyjana maintains firm friendships with two fellow alumni: Samoan-regsitered architect Carinnya Feaunati and Maori housing researcher Jacqueline Paul.
Her current post, which offers the opportunity to apply a strategic approach to how design can change communities, is so much more than bricks and mortar, she says. “It’s about elevating the dignity of our Pacific people through leading with our values, it’s about how we are thinking holistically of growing jobs and skills, addressing health in our community, and strengthening our relationship with tangata whenua for generations to come. I think this new role is the future.”
