A Tauranga man who has been building resilience and reducing at-risk behaviours in youth for 19 years has been named a semi-finalist in the Kiwibank New Zealand Local Hero of the Year Awards.

Dan Allen-Gordon, who is BOP regional manager for the Graeme Dingle Foundation, works to reduce at-risk behaviours – such as truancy, bullying, suicidal ideation and other risks – for young people to succeed.

He's also raised $11.5 million to positively impact more than 42,000 young people via mentoring and value programmes in the last two decades.

One programme is Project K – where Year 10 students learn life skills, build confidence, and find direction and purpose during 14 months.

'There's nothing more I would want to do than what I am doing.”

Working for the Graeme Dingle Foundation, Dan says he's proud of what he sees every day.

'Empowering our young people to be their best selves, to succeed in whatever they want to do and just see their life turn around by just supporting them, so they feel connected, and not judged”.

Outside of work, Dan has been a Tauranga's Sunrise Club rotarian for 14 years, and was a junior rugby referee for 15 years.

He doesn't know who nominated him for the Kiwibank awards, but is honoured. 'I don't really like to put myself out there but it's kind of something I have to do in order to create awareness for the work that we do. It's more about helping our rangatahi. I just get so much pleasure out of it.”

Dan says it'd be amazing to win the accolade 'because it acknowledges the strength of the work that we do at the foundation and perhaps it would give me a platform to get people in NZ to reach out and get more people helping more kids”.

He says it takes a village to raise our rangatahi and that the problems youth face could be different if eligible adults stepped up as mentors.

'I think that could dramatically change things for the country and those poor, lost kids that are doing stuff out of anger because they don't make the connection of why they're doing it.

'I wish we could reach more because there's so many kids that need our help.”