Kia ora koutou,

I hope this finds you all very well. I wanted to let you know a little of what we’ve been doing over the year, as well as our sense of next steps. 

 

This year, we were able to remount the formal Tauiwi Tautoko training programme across the country. From April to June, we ran a refreshed curriculum including new resources and guest workshops by our friends at Inclusive Aotearoa Collective Tāhono and Fireside Collective. We also developed our facilitator team to include three new facilitators for this course, including a tauiwi of colour facilitator who had the role of facilitating a new tauiwi of colour caucus within the course – which was hugely appreciated by tauiwi of colour in our programme, and a great success and source of learning in itself. 

 

This April-June course convened four pairs of facilitators across four locations – Whakatū Nelson, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, and online for those we couldn’t reach via those three cities – and had approximately 75 volunteers do this training. That is 75 tauiwi who are more equipped, confident, and active in ‘calling in’ racism where it occurs in their own communities and spheres of influence. From this cohort, who worked on and offline, we estimate roughly 7,000 anti-racist interventions and ‘courageous conversations’ across the country over the course. 

 

One important innovation that came of this course was a call for not simply a tauiwi of colour caucus, but a by- and for-tauiwi of colour version of the course. We are excited to say this is already underway, with Lincoln Dam and Wendy Wong taking the lead on this new course, to launch in 2023. We also are making moves to have this new co-leadership of Tauiwi Tautoko reflected in the community and culture overall. 

 

In light of this development, we ran our second training for the year for pākehā, with further adaptations to both cover new learning tailored for pākehā involved in anti-racism work, and to enable better outcomes during the constraints of COVID et al in these uncertain times (namely, a shorter and wholly online training). We are currently running this second course with approximately 40 volunteers, and have also increased our leadership capacity through two new facilitators. We are seeing record retention rates in what can be at times a difficult learning journey and practice for volunteers, and we are very gratified by the positive impacts of these changes to date. 

 

Now that Tauiwi Tautoko founder Laura O'Connell Rapira is elsewhere, we also inaugurated a tangata whenua advisory group. We first met together in July and will again in December, with ad-hoc meetings with advisory group members throughout the year as needed. This has been a powerful new structure that ensures the decisions and developments we are making are accountable to and guided by tangata whenua at every turn. 

 

Beyond these changes to our structure and course, we have also maintained daily the online community of volunteers, working hard to sustain and grow a sense of community and connection so as to keep volunteers active in this practice beyond the course. Members of this broader community, along with ActionStation and The Workshop, have also worked to create conversation guides on the Māori Health Authority and co-governance more generally, based on the Tauiwi Tautoko approach. 

Tauiwi Tautoko has been featured and of great interest to Dangerous Speech Project (UK), Social Movement Technologies (US), and most recently STOPFARRIGHT, who are currently working to replicate Tauiwi Tautoko to fit the Irish context. Our growing collaborations with The Workshop, ActionStation, and other aligned organisations this year will also help to extend and deepen the integrity and impact of our work. 

To support the broader volunteer community to be more meaningfully connected and remain active, we are currently creating a ‘community weaving’ role who can bring in particular skill and creativity to enhance this dimension of Tauiwi Tautoko. This will help develop Tauiwi Tautoko while safeguarding the depth of its learning and best practice: building connections within the volunteer community, maximising the people power of the incredible volunteers we have from all spheres of influence in Aotearoa, and growing relationships and enabling coordination with other organisations, groups, and campaigns so that we are increasingly impactful and trusted. 

 

We are grateful to the funding we have been able to secure for some of these activities in 2023, and work to find other sources, in order to continue to grow and support an ever-larger community of tauiwi who are equipped, confident, and active in compassionately ‘calling in’ racism where it occurs in their communities and spheres of influence with this evidence-based and proven effective approach. 

 

To all those who have supported us this year - volunteering your time, brilliance, creativity, heart, grit to this work, helping to fund this, encouraging us or sharing about us where you think it is useful - thank you, from all of us at Tauiwi Tautoko. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou!