Honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi

Ko te ara hei whakaūria ō mātou tikanga Māori – The path to strengthening our Māori tikanga

Ko te ara hei whakaūria ō mātou tikanga Māori – The path to strengthening our Māori tikanga

Our Strategic Plan Framework

Since InsideOUT began, we have always held a commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. This includes honouring it both in our constitution and policies, and in practice. A few examples of this are ensuring takatāpui representation through things like our More Than Four video resource and our Out on the Shelves campaign. We hold annual hui on marae with te ao Māori and takatāpui workshops, and developed this resource to support a rainbow inclusive pōwhiri process.

Annually the board looks over and adjusts the InsideOUT strategic plan and policy documents to reflect the changing nature of the work that we do for rainbow young people in Aotearoa, and to ensure that we’re updating and our processes and upholding Te Tiriti in all that we do. In 2017 we started a process of consulting with Elizabeth Kerekere to further integrate kaupapa Māori into our organisational structure. Since our initial Te Tiriti o Waitangi trainings with Elizabeth in 2017 and 2018, we have been steadily working towards bringing more Māori language and tikanga into the organisation across all levels. 

As part of the initial mahi post-training, we underwent a review of our strategic plan and all of our governance processes that resulted in an action plan with recommendations for how we as an organisation can improve our incorporation of te ao Māori. The past years using the Whatu Raranga framework (developed for Te Ara Taiohi, gifted to us by Elizabeth Kerekere) have been fantastic, and allowed us as an organisation to begin to reframe the important ideas and structures underpinning all of our operations, and begin to decolonise our processes. The aforementioned framework incorporates weaving to structure our strategic plan into four groups (outlined below) founded upon kaupapa Māori, and we’re incredibly excited and grateful that Elizabeth Kerekere and Te Ara Taiohi have allowed us to continue using this framework. 

We’ve also adjusted our trust deed to hold three dedicated spaces for tangata whenua board members at all times as a minimum, to ensure that Māori voices are prioritised and represented at a governance level in our organisation.

We have also begun work towards providing training for our volunteers, staff and board to upskill themselves in te reo Māori. In 2019 and 2020 we provided six lessons on te reo Māori to help our staff and volunteers become more comfortable with the pronunciation of Māori words, use basic phrases to introduce themselves and their whānau, understand core cultural concepts of Te Ao Māori (e.g. utu, rangatiratanga, manaakitanga, whakapapa), and better understand the origins and meaning of takatāpui identities.

We are currently in the process of developing a longer-term language plan for InsideOUT, and a more structured plan for te reo lessons going forward, and we look forward to seeing what the next year has to offer, and how much more we will progress in this facet of our mahi. 

All of this work so far has been a fantastic opportunity for us to increase our understanding of the ways in which we can decolonise our practices and uplift Māori voices in our organisation, and we look forward to continuing on this ongoing journey with support from our communities. 

He waka eke noa – We’re all in this together