Co-designing with our Maori families

We value the unique contribution that our Māori partners in the community have made to our programmes so far and respect the contributions that they can make in the future. 

Please go to https://tinyurl.com/NNNZparticipants to listen to our Maori participants' testimonies.

We follow the Māori health ‘te whare tapa whā’ model, and its 4 intertwined dimensions developed by Dr. Mason Durie.

• Taha tinana - our physical health - recognising that physical health is core to optimal development that our physical ‘being’ supports our essence and shelters us from the external environment. 
• Taha wairua - our spiritual health or essence - recognising that unseen and unspoken energies impact our capacity for faith and wider communication. Our life force  determines us as individuals and as a collective, who and what we are, where we have come from and where we are going. 
• Taha whānau - our wider family health - impacts on our capacity to belong, to care and to share because as individuals, we are part of wider social systems. Whānau provides us with the strength to be who we are. Our extended families are core contributors to our wellbeing and in turn we each make unique contributions to our whānau. This is the link to our ancestors, our ties with the past, the present and the future.
• Taha hinengaro - our mental health - impacts on our communication ability to think and to feel. Emotions, feelings and thoughts are fundamental building blocks of the body and soul and who we are in this world. 

We honour the guiding principles of the Treaty of Waikato - Partnership, Protection and Participation: 

• We respectfully engage with our Māori partners in the community to collaborate, engage and meaningfully consult with Māori hapū and iwi, to consider all perspectives. Hori, our Māori facilitator explains in this video clip why he decided to train as a facilitator for our programs. We are honoured when communities engage with us to build partnerships for the benefit of our tamariki and akonga.
• We actively engage with our Māori partners in the community that decisions made are tika (right) and follow kawa (protocol), ensuring implementation of Māori values. We invite our Māori participants and their whānau to share their knowledge during our sessions. Koru shares in this video clip why he enjoyed participating in our program and how he felt it respected his values - Koru talks to parents like him and how important peer-learning and sharing experiences have been for him.
• Participation – we actively support meaningful dialogue and relationships with iwi and hapū so they have input into decisions that could affect them. We have co-designed some of the programme elements with Maori colleagues and participating families so that more Maori voices could be heard... and are thrilled when new people and groups ask to join and co-design programmes for their communities. Please go to this page to read about this work.