Our Vision

Healthy rangatahi: valued, supported and positively engaged in life

Our Mission

To support healthy, mana-enhancing development of rangatahi in Aotearoa by being responsive to the needs of those who work with them through:

  • Research and Evaluation
  • Training
  • Advocacy

Our Values

  • Working in partnership with Māori and honouring the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi
  • Being a bicultural organisation that is inclusive of all cultures, ethnicities and identities
  • Maintaining youth participation at all levels of the organisation
  • Seeking to honour the contribution of Pasifika people and the 'Pacific Way'
  • Promoting holistic views of positive youth development which include wellbeing in the physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, social, family, school and community areas of life
  • Working by co-ordination, sharing and strengthening

Our Working Model

We ensure people working with or supporting young people have access to high quality information about healthy youth development relevant to rangatahi in Aotearoa, New Zealand by producing:

  • community-based research that aligns with other research to inform the knowledge base about healthy youth development
  • evidence-informed training that supports the healthy development of rangatahi
  • evaluations of programmes and services provided for youth

We ensure the voices of rangatahi are included in the knowledge base about healthy youth development because:

  • we are an organisation that is focused on research/evaluation and training by, with and for young people
  • we strive to involve rangatahi in every aspect of our organisation by recruiting and training young people as researchers, educators, and board members

We advocate for evidence-informed policy and practice that enhances healthy youth development by:

  • providing space for youth voices to be heard
  • working to support greater dissemination and translation of youth development research

Short History

The Collaborative Trust began in 2003 with community meetings at which the three goals of research, training and advocacy were agreed on. After a scoping project in 2004 the new Trust was registered in 2005, and a manager appointed. The structure of the organization was developed by the Board to formalize the function of training and research committees with Chairpersons and a Director. These were all staffed by volunteers. The first activity of the Trust was to run a seminar series giving local researchers the opportunity to share their work with the community. Our first one day hui was based around local researchers talking about their work with the community . This grew to a two day national hui with a pre-hui workshop. We now work with Ara Taiohi to run the Involve conferences. We have undertaken many funded research, evaluation and training contracts both nationally and locally. Topic based workshops have been the most recent training activity and a Youth Health and Development resource manual  and a book of stories from young people have been sold across the country to a wide range of professionals. The finances of the Trust had been built to the extent that we were supported by a Director/Research and Evaluation Manager, a Training Manager and an Administration Manager - all these positions were part-time.

Now with Government research contracts no longer going to NGOs and increased competition in the provision of training, we have trimmed our operation to focus on offering research-based workshops, delivered in-house, to a wide range of organisations - all with a strong focus on positive youth development. Our current research contracts are all continuing, as with all our work, supported by our dedicated team of contractors and volunteers.