PĀNUI
NEWS
Bringing It Home: Reflections from the Alcohol Harm Prevention Workforce Wānanga.
27 / 02 / 2026
Last week I sat in a room with Māori and Pasifika AOD practitioners, clinicians, and community workers at Purapura Whetu for Bringing It Home, a workforce wānanga focused on alcohol harm prevention.
Within te ao Māori, people are not understood in parts. They are the sum of everything they come from. Neither can their behaviour be understood in isolation. You cannot separate a person from their context and expect to help them.
Before we can support change, we need to understand what the drinking is holding together. What does it protect? What would it cost someone to stop? And if someone does step away from that behaviour, what are they stepping into?
People seeking support are already carrying weight before anything begins; judgement from services, pressure to keep drinking, guilt about what change might cost. Many whānau avoid talking about alcohol because it opens doors to other things that cannot be spoken. Harm, neglect, sexual violence. Mamae carried for too long in silence. Disclosure can come with shame, fear of disloyalty, exclusion, exposing harm, or becoming isolated from whānau and community.
In many Māori and Pasifika communities, alcohol is embedded in hospitality, celebration, and connection. Reducing or refusing it is not just a personal decision. It is a social act, one that can put someone at odds with their whānau, or cost them their place within it. For many people, the challenge is not simply stopping drinking. It is how to make change without losing belonging.
From within the whānau system, silence can make sense. Speaking risks shame, conflict, exclusion, and loss of belonging. This is where individualised behaviour-change models struggle. Health is not held in one place. It sits across the body, within whānau, and within the wider community. Resilience is not an individual trait. It sits in who is around you, and in the relationships built before the moment of need. Trust therefore becomes a precondition for change. Someone who understands the layers of your struggle, your whānau system, and the realities around you. Through pūrākau, people gain language for how they feel, and language to offer their whānau about what they are carrying. People do not always need more information or motivation. They need social permission. A reason their community will accept.
"People do not always need more information or motivation. They need social permission. A reason their community will accept."
For many people, alcohol is tied to belonging, connection, routine, and identity. Change cannot simply mean removal. It has to offer another way of staying connected without losing yourself in the process. If we ask someone to change, what are we offering in its place? Most models move people from illness to wellness. But what if we aimed for more than that, genuine flourishing held within community? This requires prosocial spaces that carry belonging and accountability without judgement. Familiar spaces and low-bar entry points. No clinical language, no preaching, no expectation that you arrive already ready. The whakaaro behind the Tāne Run Club reflected this well. Not a highly resourced intervention, but a simple relational space built from the strengths already present within the community. No pressure to disclose, but openness to organic kōrero and debrief when it comes. Spaces where people are safe to be vulnerable alongside others who understand the social and relational costs of change. A reason to get up in the morning. A reason not to drink the night before.
Faith can sometimes operate in a similar way. “God told me to” is legible in a way that personal health decisions often are not. It allows someone to step back without directly challenging the norm.
If care works through trust, relationships, and cultural understanding, then the frameworks we use matter.
People are more likely to trust services when their experience is culturally legible, when their whānau systems are understood, and when the realities shaping their lives are recognised rather than flattened into individual behaviour.
The idea that approaches should sit apart, or belong exclusively to one group, reflects a more Western way of organising knowledge.
Models like Te Whare Tapa Whā and Fonofale are grounded in relational wellbeing and collective responsibility. They are not in competition. They are aligned expressions of the same worldview. These frameworks give people and their whānau language for experience in ways that make sense within their world. For some whānau, including Māori, a Pasifika framework may better reflect how their world is organised. Using it is not a departure from kaupapa Māori practice. It is an extension of it. But this becomes much harder when the workforce itself does not reflect the communities being served.
Many services, including kaupapa Māori organisations, are supporting Pasifika whānau without a corresponding Pasifika workforce. Pasifika are largely absent from the addiction workforce, despite high levels of harm. Around 46% of Pasifika people would be considered hazardous drinkers, and yet only around 7% of DAPAANZ-registered addiction clinicians are Pasifika. Māori representation has grown to roughly 30% through years of deliberate effort. The same cannot yet be said for Pasifika.
If care works through trust, relationships, and cultural legibility, then that absence is not only a workforce issue. It is a clinical one. Without that understanding, experiences can become flattened into individual behaviour rather than understood within the wider realities shaping people’s lives. This reflects a deeper disconnect between the systems we have built and the communities most affected by alcohol harm.
In that context, bringing a Pasifika framework into a kaupapa Māori space is not a mismatch. It is a necessary response to who is actually being served.
If health works through interconnection, the same applies to the organisations providing care. More willingness to share approaches, work relationally, and move beyond territorial behaviour.
The wānanga itself reflected that interconnection in practice. A room of Māori and Pasifika AOD experts, sharing knowledge and building capability together. I left thinking about maemae and permission, and what it costs someone to change when their environment does not shift with them. If the barrier is not knowledge or motivation, but social permission, then the work is not just with individuals. It is in how whānau and communities make change possible without losing belonging, through reconnection to culture, whakapapa, and intergenerational knowledge.
