One such supporter is principal youth court judge Andrew Becroft, who said in a recent letter of support for Youth Quest that it did excellent work for at-risk young people.

Judge Becroft wrote that sitting as “a Judge in Porirua, I have observed the changes in the young offenders appearing before the Court who have completed the Youth Quest programme”.

High praise indeed for an organisation that hasn’t been running that long and basically started with the dream and faith of one man committed to making a difference.

Mr Fong had established quite a career for himself in the police force. He was a constable in Otara and worked as a youth aid officer, before taking up a role as physical training and firearms instructor at the Royal NZ Police College in Porirua.

But nothing was going to deter him from a path he believed the Lord wanted him to take — he left a well-paid job, to move to one where he basically had nothing.

For Mr Fong, it was a risk, but a risk worth taking.

Looking back, he says it was the “most rewarding decision” he had ever made in his life.

Before he started Youth Quest, Mr Fong says he and his wife both received prompting from God from various people over several years, including ones affirming God had given his wife a gift for youth.

“We kept brushing it off. Three or four times we got words from different people at different churches and each time we ran like Jonah. God caught up with me in 2006 and we made the decision I would leave the Police, and step out,” he recalls.

“God gave me a vision…and really it was just getting enough courage to step out in faith. I contacted my brother-in-law in Otara as I knew he had been with God years before and had done work with youth. He had moved away from God in a big way into drugs. I sent him an email and essentially said to him later to sell his house and move to Kapiti Coast to help me with this vision.”

Despite not being paid yet, Mr Fong’s brother-in-law moved his family and gave up his lifestyle to be part of God’s vision. The two families, with seven children, lived in Mr Fong’s house.

“We lived with no wages for seven months, living by faith before the Tindall Foundation gave us some money,” says Mr Fong.

“Even today my wife and I stand in a position financially where most people would say ‘how do you survive’? I think even our auditor thinks that as well, and for that there is only one answer, ‘by the grace of God’. It’s a life which is reliant totally on God daily, and to look any further than what God has given us today seems a waste of time. We set short and long term goals but essentially where God leads we follow and on most occasions our plans will always change and that’s the excitement of a journey which only God can lead, through living by faith”.

Youth Quest has also received support and funding assistance from a Vodafone ‘World of Difference’ grant and Mr Fong says the Tindall Foundation supported the programme when no-one else would. “They are amazing people who believed in us”.

Recently the Todd Foundation has also given some assistance.

Mr Fong, who also spent some time in the army before joining the police force, says he finds his deepest fulfilment is now in his work for God. He loves helping to make a real and positive difference in the lives of many young people through the programme.

Based at Paraparaumu, Youth Quest currently works with around 100 young people each year, including through school programmes and working with families. There are now 11 full-time paid staff all of whom are committed Christians, as well as around 20 volunteers on call, to provide mentoring and help to those referred to the programme. The number of young men who have graduated through Youth Quest courses now stands at 65, but Mr Fong points out that there are siblings of people on courses and families also being helped.

The programme includes: bushcamps, designed to take youth out of their comfort zones; managing stress and anger; drug and addiction management; leadership and team building and work experience.

Mr Fong says Youth Quest staff “love God immensely. For the past four years every day before our day starts whether in town or in the bush we have always met as staff to pray and share the Bible.”

The impact that mentoring can have on a person is also something that he has experienced as he was mentored by a Christian police officer who brought him to faith and deepened his commitment to live his life as a Christian.

It was his faith in Christ, he says that allowed him to handle much better the many situations and cases of trauma police officers routinely face in their work.

To truly understand what drives this dedicated man in his bid to help troubled youth, maybe we need to look back a bit further at his life.

Brought up in a family of 11, Mr Fong remembers many occasions when the family had nothing in the cupboards to eat — because his parents were drinking with the extended family at the pub.

It got to the point, he says, where his two oldest siblings did burglaries to feed the other seven children; these two ended up being caught and were subsequently placed into social welfare custody.

Violence, says Mr Fong, ran rife in the family and extended family. At only 13 years of age, he was drinking at the Black Power pad with a relative who at the time was the president of the Black Power. “I became very violent and have in my short time on this earth been bottled, stabbed, shot at, and involved in many fights. I got caught at the age of 16 committing a crime.”

It was then that his mother, a cousin of hers who was an army recruiter and the police arranged to have Mr Fong placed in the Army.