In this episode, we meet Aaron Hendry, co-founder of Kickback and the driving force behind The Front Door — a single point of entry for rangatahi experiencing homelessness on K Road in Tāmaki Makaurau. Aaron came to this work as a young youth worker in West Auckland, sitting with a sixteen-year-old who had been sleeping at a bus stop. Confident there would be a system for this, he rang Work and Income.

Too young, they said. He rang CYFS. Too old for them too. That clarity never left him. In this episode, Aaron talks about the pipelines the state has built directly into homelessness — the care system, the justice system, the health system — and why over sixty percent of the rangatahi coming through The Front Door are Māori, and why that cannot be separated from colonisation and land loss. He talks about Wales, and what Aotearoa could choose to do now: a duty to assist, a duty to refer, and a duty to collaborate — three legislative obligations that would mean no young person is ever again discharged from a hospital, a prison, or state care into nothing. And he talks about why it has to be law, not policy, because policy falls away with a change of government, and the framework to enforce it already exists.

He ends not with statistics but with a question: what system would you want designed for the people you love? His answer, honestly given, is not yet this one.

We'd like to thank Aaron for taking the time to speak with us for this episode.

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