COMMENTARY: Pirihira Whata, Practice & Development Lead
Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking into rangatahi mental wellbeing and what actually shapes it in our communities. It’s easy for the conversation to focus on services or crisis response, but when you sit with the issue a bit longer, it becomes clear that rangatahi wellbeing is influenced by so many different parts of the system.
Things like the environments rangatahi move through every day, the relationships around them, whether they feel a sense of belonging and identity, and whether the spaces they’re in support their wellbeing. Schools, whānau, community groups, iwi leadership, and local policy all play a role.
One of the Healthy Families principles that really resonates in this space is the idea of looking upstream. Instead of only responding when things are going wrong, the work becomes about strengthening the conditions that help rangatahi stay well in the first place. That might mean stronger connections with culture and identity, safer community spaces, supportive school environments, or opportunities where rangatahi feel seen and valued.
Another principle that appears frequently in this work is systems thinking. When you step back, you realise that no single organisation or service can shift something as complex as rangatahi mental wellbeing on its own. The change tends to happen when relationships strengthen across the system — when education, health, iwi, community organisations, and whānau start to see how their work connects.
A big part of the role Healthy Families plays in that space is helping create those connections. Sometimes that looks like bringing people together, sometimes it’s sharing insights from different parts of the system, and sometimes it’s simply helping people see where the opportunities for collective action might sit.
Te Tiriti and mātauranga Māori are also important foundations in this space. Rangatahi wellbeing can’t be separated from identity, culture and belonging, so ensuring Māori leadership and whakaaro are shaping the work is critical if we’re serious about long-term change.
At the end of the day, the work isn’t about creating another programme or initiative. It’s about gradually shifting the environments and relationships around rangatahi so that wellbeing becomes something that’s supported across the whole system, not just in moments of crisis.
And while that kind of change takes time, what’s encouraging is seeing the growing willingness across different parts of the community to think and work in that way.
– Pirihira Whata, Practice & Development Lead
