Creating Hope, Growing Collective Wellbeing

In our region, strong whakapapa and deep community connections have always been a source of strength. Yet we are currently experiencing a significant increase in suicide, with more lives lost in the past 12 months than in the previous year.

Each loss is felt across whānau, hapori, and communities, highlighting the urgent need to rethink how we approach wellbeing and prevention.

This is not solely a challenge for services. It reflects wider system conditions, how people experience connection, purpose, support, and belonging in their everyday lives.

Healthy Families WRR is working alongside communities to respond differently.

We are leading Growing Collective Wellbeing, our regional suicide prevention approach, aligned with Healthy Families priorities. This approach focuses on strengthening prevention, enabling community leadership, and supporting systems change to address the conditions that shape wellbeing.

Across the region, this shift is already visible.
It can be seen in:

• Community led wānanga and kōrero spaces that foster connection and support

• Creative expression that promotes healing

• Peer support networks that strengthen belonging

These are not isolated efforts. They are part of a broader movement toward collective wellbeing.

Healthy Families WRR is working to strengthen systems by:

• Supporting community led wānanga grounded in mātauranga Māori

• Enabling hapori led storytelling to shift narratives and mental models

• Using insights to identify patterns and act early

• Valuing lived experience alongside data and evidence

• Strengthening connections between communities and decision makers

Through Growing Collective Wellbeing, we focus on prevention, community leadership, and systems change, building the conditions where wellbeing can thrive. This is systems change in practice, shifting the conditions that influence wellbeing, not just responding to outcomes.

It requires moving from deficit based thinking to strength based approaches, recognising communities as leaders, and embedding prevention as a shared responsibility. It also means moving from crisis response to prevention, from fragmented services to integrated approaches, and from individual focus to collective wellbeing.

Communities are already leading this change. The opportunity now is for systems to align, invest in prevention, and walk alongside communities to sustain it.

Together, we can strengthen the conditions for collective wellbeing now and for future generations.