Warren R Heke

07/10/2025

Our kaupapa of hauora, kotahitanga, and whanaungatanga isn’t a statement on the wall — it’s alive in moments like these.

Seeing our whānau come together in this new park space is a beautiful reminder that wellbeing begins with connection. 💚

01/10/2025

We grieve his loss. We remember him as a whole person, not just his struggles. And we commit ourselves again to the work of listening, believing, and standing with those who are dismissed, marginalised, and silenced.

Moe mai rā e hoa. Rest now in peace.

29/09/2025

🔥 Housing in Aotearoa: Inequality on Repeat

After World War II, the government bought over a million acres to settle returned soldiers on farms. About 10% of Pākehā servicemen were given land. For Māori? Barely 1–2%.

Māori soldiers who fought in the same battles, bled in the same mud, came home to nothing. That stolen chance for property became a massive transfer of wealth to one group — and a locked door for the other.

Fast forward to today. If you’re not already on the property ladder, you’re probably never getting on. House prices have locked whole generations into life-long renting. And renting doesn’t build equity. It leaves nothing to pass on.

Your kids start at zero. Their kids start at zero. The cycle continues.

This isn’t new, it’s history repeating. A system that privileged one group and sidelined another. The legacy is written in our housing stats: Māori homeownership collapsed, Pākehā wealth compounded, and the divide calcified.

Now, as more whānau are pushed into permanent social renting, we need to ask: are we repeating history? Are we creating a future where some families pass on security and prosperity, while others can only hand down a rent bill?

If we’re serious about equity, we can’t just tinker at the edges. We need to face the truth: the system has always been stacked. We need to start building one that finally breaks the cycle.

What do you think? Are we bold enough to rewrite the story this time, or will we let history echo again?

27/09/2025

Moral injury has now been formally recognised in the DSM-5-TR.

That matters.

But here’s the reality we see in health and social care: moral injury doesn’t just happen “out there” on the frontline. It often happens inside the very organisations meant to uphold care and compassion.

When an organisation claims values like dignity, aroha, and justice, but the culture, systems, or leadership push in the opposite direction, the harm lands on staff. Carers are forced into impossible choices: mute your values to survive the system, or keep speaking until you burn out. Over time, disillusionment gets rebranded as “professionalism,” and silence becomes indoctrination.

This isn’t a personal weakness. It’s systemic harm. And no amount of resilience workshops or self-care slogans will fix it. Healing requires organisations to align their purpose with their practice — in how they lead, how they resource, and how they treat their people.

Moral injury is not an individual problem. It’s a collective responsibility.

20/09/2025

It has never been easier to pass judgment on people and places we don’t actually know. Entire organisations, political movements, even whole nations are reduced to caricatures - dismissed or condemned on the strength of a headline, a meme, or someone else’s outrage.

And while we’re quick to critique the distant, how often do we stay silent about the brokenness right at our own doorstep?

That isn’t wisdom. Proximity breeds understanding; distance breeds assumptions. If you want to enter a public conversation, do it with some measure of lived connection. Ground your words in real relationships, in responsibility, in truth you’ve tested with your own eyes and hands.

Repeating the soundbites of others is not credibility - it’s just echo. And echo chambers are loud but empty.

What we need are voices that rise from courage, humility, and presence. Voices that speak not because it’s fashionable, but because they have stood close enough to know.

18/09/2025

Every day we’re flooded with polarising rhetoric. Words like “woke agenda”, “DEI”, “RSE in schools”, or “puberty blockers for children” are thrown around. Not to spark understanding, but to shut it down. These slogans act like tribal markers, fuelling division and keeping us from the hard but necessary work of dialogue.

When public service, education, and health get reduced to battlegrounds, it’s the most vulnerable who suffer.

Our values push us in a different direction: humility to know we don’t see the whole picture, reciprocity to honour dignity, courage to face complexity, and hope that communities can flourish together rather than fracture apart.

We don’t need more thought-stopping cliches. We need deeper listening, braver conversations, and genuine care.

17/09/2025

This pocket park is just a beginning. It honours the whakapapa of place and people — creating a space of dignity and belonging. But the challenge ahead remains enormous and complex. Real change takes more than a park; it takes all of us, together.

The new pocket park has tables, shade and a basketball hoop for whānau.

16/09/2025

Our whānau deserve more than one-off fleeting wins. They deserve courageous resourcing that builds trust and restores dignity.

13/09/2025

Yesterday we gathered on whenua that carries deep stories, shaped and stewarded by mana whenua, to open something small in size but huge in meaning: a new pocket-park and half-court.

This project only happened because of kotahitanga — many hands bringing their baskets together:
Mana Whenua | Hastings District Council | Anglican Care Waiapu | Ministry of Social Development | Farming House | St Andrew’s Presbyterian Parish | Hastings Church

“Mā te ara whāngai, me te kotahitanga o ngā ringa raupa,
ka tukua te noho, ka whakahokia te mana, ka ora te iwi katoa.”

- Through the path of whāngai, and the partnership of many hands, belonging is gifted, dignity is restored, and all the people flourish.

The reality we face is that too many of our people, predominantly Māori, disconnected from whānau, hapū, and iwi; carry life alone.
Belonging for them is not automatic. It is conditional. Transactional.
But here at Kuhu Mai, we taking another path. We stand in the role of whāngai. Not to replace, but to embrace, nurture, and hold until reconciliation is possible. This park is an expression of ara whāngai: a place that says:

you are seen, you are valued, you belong.

This is also a story of what happens when collaboration replaces competition. Turf wars gave way to shared turf. Ownership gave way to stewardship. What emerged was not just a park, but trust.
Let's be clear: whāngai is not short-term. It is a long journey together. And so too is this kaupapa. If our mahi is to be sustainable, it will require courageous, innovative resourcing. Not just for one-off or fleeting wins, but genuine partnership grounded in trust and generosity.

So today, as we celebrate, I also extend an invitation to funders, providers, and partners who are willing to walk with us in new ways. If together we can create this pocket park, what else might we dare to build?

For me, this park is not the end of a project. It is the beginning of a story — one that dares to say:

✨ Kindness is infrastructure.
✨ Joy is justice.
✨ Our flourishing is bound together.

Every shot taken here, every conversation on these benches, is already a win.

💡 If you’re interested in exploring courageous ways to support this kaupapa, I’d love to connect.

08/09/2025

Local elections are nearly here, and again I notice the same pattern: candidates talk endlessly about budgets, infrastructure, and growth, but say little about social wellbeing or environmental care. This silence matters.

Economics cannot be separated from people or place. When we reduce community to numbers, the most vulnerable suffer. At Kuhu Mai we see it daily: poverty, housing insecurity, mental distress, and ecological strain woven together. These realities are not “someone else’s problem.” Councils shape housing, bylaws, transport, and green spaces. To ignore this interdependence is not oversight—it is abdication.

Leadership, especially in the bicultural context of New Zealand, is about justice, stewardship, and solidarity with the marginalised. To speak only of rates and growth while remaining silent about the poor and about creation is to fail the calling of leadership.

As voters, we should demand more than efficiency. We should ask who will honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi, who will confront inequity, and who will protect our environment. Prosperity without justice is fragile. Growth without creation care is unsustainable.

Our city deserves leaders who have courage to look beyond the balance sheet and work for wholeness in people, whenua, and community

05/09/2025

Like many Māori who spent the majority of their life culturally isolated, floundering, and bound in a tauiwi paradigm, I carry a deep sense of whakama engaging with Te Ao Māori.

These words from Te Arikinui Kuini Nga wai hono i te po have brought me so much hope, for so many reasons:

"Heoi', āe, he 'heoi' tonu tō ēnei kōrero, ko te mate kē o tēnei momo whakakotahi, ko tēnei - te āhua nei, ki te kore tātou e ara, e hāmama, e hāpai rākau, whakarere haki, haka rānei, kua pōhēhē tātou, he koretake tātou, ānō me whai hoariri tātou e Māori ai tātou. Kāo!"

But there is a 'however' in this story. If we don't rise up, yell, wield weapons, fly flags or perform haka, we mistakenly think we're ineffective as Māori. Being Māori is not defined by having an enemy or a challenge to overcome.

"Taku Māoritanga kei roto i taku kōrero Māori, taku Māoritanga kei roto i taku tiaki i te taiao, taku Māoritanga kei roto i te pānui me te ako i taku hītori, taku Māoritanga hoki, ahakoa iti, kei roto i taku kōwhiri kē i taku ingoa Māori tēnā i taku ingoa Pākehā, he nui ngā momo whakatinanatanga o te Māoritanga, kaua kau noa i ngā wā o te porotū."

Being Māori is speaking our language. It is taking care of the environment. It is reading and learning about our history. It is the choice to be called by our Māori name. There are many ways to manifest being Māori, not just in times of protest.

"'Koinei pū taku pāpā i kī ai, 'Kia Māori, i ia rā, i ia rā', he mōhio nōna, me whāngai e tātou te mauri o te Māoritanga, āwhā mai, āio mai, porotū mai, porotū kore mai rānei, kei reira te tino whakamōhio ki te ao, e ora ana ahau, e ora ana te Māoritanga."

My father said 'be Māori all day, every day', because he knew we needed to be strong in good times and bad, with or without protest. And that's how we can express our vitality as Māori.

04/08/2025

“We’re invited into rooms, but decisions are made before we arrive or after we leave. Our visibility is welcomed; our voice is not. Or worse, our voice is co-opted and sanitised into institutional branding.”

I’ve sat in too many rooms where lived experience voice is exploited to support institutional fiction.

I’ve listened to leaders spout statements starting with “what we need…” who’ve never spent any time with the people their decisions affect.

Rather than asking lived experience to come sit at our table and speak, so we can curate their voice to match our plans for their salvation, we should regularly sit silently at their table and listen…

…until their suffering becomes as unbearable for us as it is for them.

A few weeks ago, I saw an announcement for a national conference on moral injury. The invite list read like a roll call of helping professions: nurses, psychiatrists, emergency responders, policy advisors.