Tamariki Wellbeing

Tamariki wellbeing and whānau wellbeing are interdependent.

Our foundational work on the Early Years Challenge revealed that families in south Auckland are often carrying a heavy burden of stress, which has a significant impact on the wellbeing of future generations.

International and New Zealand evidence is clear – better support for families in this critical time is one of our biggest opportunities for tackling inequity and enabling intergenerational wellbeing.

Over the last six years we’ve worked with whānau, ‘aiga, community groups, NGOs, philanthropic and public sector partners to understand what it takes to enable change in the early years system.

Our work has highlighted that the biggest factors holding the status quo in place are ‘business as usual’, top-down and siloed policy and investment approaches. Our work on the ground and with central government agencies highlights critical barriers to progress, including:

• Decisions are often made very far away from the lived realities of whānau and ‘aiga in south Auckland, with limited active involvement of families, iwi and our communities.

• Siloed policy making and commissioning means that, too often, efforts aren’t mutually reinforcing on the ground and are sometimes contradictory.

• Most of our investment is focussed on downstream issues and responding to crisis, rather than upstream investment in prevention, strengthening and healing.

There is untapped potential in the public sector for working in a more joined-up way to activate the wellbeing ‘ecology’ around whānau in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life. There has been a groundswell of intention to shift towards more whānau centred and locally led ways of working. The first step towards the system changes that are needed is starting with people in place.

Our mission is to build the capability of the public service to make it happen and learn by doing.

To help accelerate progress, we’ve been acting as a hoa haere/learning partner for agencies such as Oranga Tamariki, Health NZ, ACC, Ministry of Social Development, the Child Wellbeing and Poverty Reduction Group in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and the South Auckland Social Wellbeing Board. We help galvanise their efforts to work in ways that are more orientated around what matters to people in place, enacting Te Tiriti, prioritising equity and supporting intergenerational wellbeing.

Together with our partners, we’re developing a shared learning space – a platform – that brings together different agencies and their efforts for system transformation ‘on the ground’ with whānau in locality and at a systems level.

An Early Years Implementation Learning Platform is under development. It will link learnings from the Child and Youth Wellbeing Strategy and create a tangible mechanism for cross-agency collaboration, enabling partners to learn together about how to reconfigure policy settings, investment, roles and ways of working to enable a whānau centred, equity focussed early years system that is grounded in the conditions of a particular place.

The ‘platform’ is not a piece of technology, an app or widget. Rather, it’s a model and approach that facilitates exchanges and distributes the ability to solve challenges. It creates impact by enabling other things to happen. By improving communication, learning and exposure to new people and ideas, innovation platforms like ours can help agencies to clarify their roles, organise themselves, and adapt to unforeseen challenges and new opportunities. ‘Platform thinking’ encourages people to stop thinking exclusively about solving their problem (which happens in ‘silo thinking’) in favour of being an enabler of systems change and changemakers, including whānau themselves.

See more about the Early Years Implementation Learning Platform.