Huia Mai

Home healthcare is a key service for Visionwest. Work is underway with the Home Healthcare team to develop a meaningful and robust Māori Health Plan that will pinpoint future needs.

Huia Mai and ETC continue to explore the needs of Māori and Pasifika learners and how we can offer courses that will enhance their life journey and be delivered in a way that is meaningful within their cultural worldview. These are especially important for learners who may not succeed in other contexts.

Huia Mai’s increased capacity means we are better able to contribute meaningfully to local initiatives.

Visionwest is a key player in the mahi of the Housing First Collective and we are increasing our participation in other collaborative initiatives such as West Auckland Together and the Māori Thought Collective. Within Visionwest, we continue to support services to make meaningful contributions to collaborative korero around health, social services, housing, and other advocacy forums.

We are looking more closely at how we gather information across the organisation to gain a fuller understanding of our achievements with regard to outcomes for whānau Māori. This means exploring what ‘success’ measures we use, what progress markers are most meaningful for whānau Māori, and how will we recognise the priority areas for development.

We are also reviewing policies and procedures to ensure they accommodate the diversity and inclusion our work requires.

Animoa has developed a unique approach to Te Tiriti o Waitangi training. ‘Ako Reka (Sweet learning)’ will enable participants to tell the story of Aotearoa more succinctly, understand the context surrounding the signing of Te Tiriti more meaningfully, and have a framework for wrestling with what it means to honour Te Tiriti today. 

A number of services have engaged in these workshops which will eventually be available to all staff.

Mātanga Oranga provides trauma-informed care in the form of counselling within a Kaupapa Māori framework.

We have continued to work closely with Visionwest Community Housing providing support to a number of our housing whānau and have expanded into working with whānau referred to us through Oranga Tamariki and the community.

This increase in service demand has been exacerbated by the effects of Covid and particularly the lockdowns of the past financial year. This has seen a second therapist added to the team with a third being contracted on a client-by-client basis. This increase in staff has produced one of our year’s highlights, that is knowing that we can now reach twice as many whānau.

A positively received initiative this year has been a professional hairstylist who volunteers his time and studio to provide a hairstyling and pampering day for some of our client whānau. This has had a wonderful reception and great results alongside the intensive work of trauma care. 

We are currently working on securing ongoing funding for this service so that we have security moving forward. The demand for Mātanga Oranga services is strong but because we have not yet secured community funding, we are limited in who and how many whānau we are able to assist.

Being the second year that we have participated in this pilot programme meant we were able to build on the successes and learnings of the previous year.

The lack of face-to-face engagement with rangatahi over the lockdown periods was challenging and made recruiting participants into the programme difficult. It did, however, allow us to look at various innovations including our workbook and our use of technology in more significant ways.

We have called our Pae Aronui workbook, Whāia ki tōku Aratika. This was well received by the rangatahi and has become a resource that assists each one to reflect as they journey through the year. This resource will be adapted to provide a similar journey for all rangatahi in our new programme, He Poutama Rangatahi.