WARNING: This episode contains references to domestic violence and topics around drug and substance abuse.

In this episode, we meet Mahera Maihi, founder and CEO of Mā Te Huruhuru, the first kaupapa Māori youth transitional housing provider in Aotearoa, and the Kiwibank Local Hero of the Year 2026.

Mahera grew up in Ōtara, South Auckland, the child of two people caught in a collision of worlds — her mother from a long line of educated people, experts in carving, weaving, and traditional Māori knowledge; her father the president of a Stormtroopers gang chapter, shaped by state care, by a violent father who came home broken from the Korean War, by a life that offered him few exits and no map.

What her father gave her, for all the chaos he brought, was this: education is the key to freedom. Go get educated and when you do, come back for your siblings. She did exactly that. In this episode,

Mahera talks about the night a young woman arrived at her door with blood on her face and nowhere to go, and what happened next. She talks about two years of bureaucratic combat to become a housing provider — a circular trap where each ministry required what only the other could give — and what it took to break the deadlock.

She talks about zero property damage, zero police callouts, and not one claim on the Supported Housing fund. And she talks about the deepest aspiration: to be the bridge that brings young people home. Not just to stable housing in South Auckland. Home.

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

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast—wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

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.

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we meet Rami Alrudaini, Programme Manager at Housing First Auckland — the backbone organisation coordinating collective impact across Housing First providers in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

Rami's family fled war in Iraq before he was born. Social justice was instilled in him before he had a word for it. He came into the homelessness sector from mental health, where he first witnessed people with complex needs being systematically denied access to housing, and has spent his career since building the systems and infrastructure to prevent that from happening. In this episode, Rami talks about what a backbone organisation actually does — the connective tissue that holds a collaborative together, largely invisible to the public but essential to everything else working.

He talks about the National Homelessness Data Project, what it is finding, and why welfare conditionality is showing up in the data as a direct pipeline into homelessness.

He talks about the national lived experience community of practice, and why the demand for it is coming not just from people with lived experience but from organisational leaders who recognise its value. And he talks about Finland — how one country reduced homelessness by 80% over forty years through four things: good data, prevention, Housing First as a philosophy not a contract, and building houses.

His conclusion is simple. It is not rocket science. What is missing is the political will.

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

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we meet Alpha, a Peer Support Worker on the Outreach Team at Visionwest in West Auckland.

Alpha came to the role the way the best peer workers do — not through a qualification, but through experience. After the loss of his parents, his family lost more than the people they loved. None of them were on the tenancy. The next day, they were asked to leave.

Five years of homelessness followed. When a social worker at Visionwest offered him a house through his sister, he accepted. He started as a volunteer at the Pataaka Kai food bank — shy, uncertain, four days a week. Six months later he was offered a contract. He is now a peer support worker in outreach, finding people where they are and building trust with people who have learned not to trust systems.

His qualification for the role is not a degree. It is everything that happened before.

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

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we meet Jeremy Nicholls, Supportive Housing Outreach Leader at Visionwest in West Auckland.

Jeremy did not come to outreach work through a housing career. He came through a Bible college, a taxi, and twenty-five years running a homeless shelter in Chicago's Uptown neighbourhood. He returned to New Zealand in 2021 and has been leading street-level outreach ever since.

In this episode, Jeremy talks about what his team finds every day — people living in vans along quiet residential streets in Birkenhead and Glenfield, couples moving between Blockhouse Bay and Ōrewa keeping the warrant of fitness current because the car is the house, a man who had been sleeping rough for five years because of a traumatic brain injury with no addiction, no mental health crisis, no drama, just a brain injury and nowhere to go.

He talks about why outreach is relational work and why that is not incidental to its effectiveness but the entire method. He talks about the stereotype that everyone sleeping rough is addicted or mentally unwell, why it is not true, and why antisocial behaviour in urban centres is routinely blamed on the wrong people. And he talks about what he wants: decisions about homelessness made by people who actually understand it.

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

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we meet Jill Hawkey, Executive Director of the Christchurch Methodist Mission, where she has spent twelve years growing a service spanning early childhood to end-of-life care.

Jill trained as a social worker, spent twenty-five years in international aid and development, and returned to Ōtautahi just before the 2011 earthquakes. In this episode, Jill talks about what she has watched Housing First deliver in Christchurch — decreases in hospitalisation, decreases in mental health admissions, people who were homeless now on staff — and why over 100 people are currently receiving Housing First support while still sleeping on the street, because the housing simply does not exist to put them in.

She talks about New Zealand's social housing stock sitting at 4% when Australia is at 16% and much of Europe is in the twenties and thirties, and why the private sector will never build the one- and two-bedroom accessible homes that low-income households actually need.

Jill makes the case for a cross-party ten-year housing strategy — one percentage point a year, insulated from electoral cycles — and for why, if we start from housing as a human right, everything else follows.

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

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we meet Ali Hamlin-Paenga, CEO of Te Matapihi, the national Māori housing sector peak body.

Ali has been part of Te Matapihi in three different roles, from board member to deputy chair to CEO, and she brings to the work a framework that is, in its foundations, entirely different from the frameworks that govern most housing policy in Aotearoa.

For Te Matapihi, the Māori housing system is built on five elements: wai, kai, whānau, whenua, and whakapapa. The housing policy world tends to see a house. Te Matapihi sees a system of relationships between people, land and identity that a house either supports or it does not.

In this episode, Ali talks about the distinction between homelessness and what she calls houselessness, and why emergency housing is not a home.

She talks about He Ara Hiki Mauri — five years of negotiation across two governments to build a genuinely Māori-led response that refuses to be a template, because every rohe knows what it needs. She talks about whakapapa as a practical tool, not a cultural abstraction, and what it means to bring someone home. And she talks about the cycle she has watched repeat across her career, and why the system's assumption that the ultimate product for Māori is an affordable rental is precisely the wrong place to start.

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

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we meet Bianca Johanson — Chief Executive of Manaaki Rangatahi, the national collective working to prevent and end youth homelessness in Aotearoa.

Bianca is a social worker of nearly thirty years, and someone for whom, by the statistics, homelessness should have been a personal outcome. She was transracially adopted in the closed stranger adoption era, born Māori and raised by a Pākehā whānau. The disconnection from whakapapa, from culture, from the knowledge of where she came from — is something she has spent her career working to prevent in others.

In this episode, Bea talks about what she found when she went out and listened to the youth homelessness sector in Tāmaki — competitive, fragmented, and in places actively hostile — and what it took to build something different.

She talks about what a young person homeless tonight in Aotearoa actually encounters, why rangatahi are not even making it to the receptionist at MSD, and what Manaaki Rangatahi is calling for: a national youth homelessness strategy, supported youth housing with standards, a Duty to Assist, and rangatahi voice embedded in everything. And she talks about the goal — 2040, no youth homelessness — and why the collective is not waiting for permission.

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

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we meet Linda Murphy, Health and Social Services Coordinator at the Calder Centre, part of the Auckland City Mission.

Linda has been a nurse, a librarian, an Anglican minister, and a Human Rights Commission employee. In 2003 she slipped on a wet pavement on Wesley Street and was picked up by a dishevelled one-eyed man while suited pedestrians walked by. That moment cost her nothing and changed the direction of the rest of her life. For more than twenty years she has been accompanying vulnerable people through illness, crisis, and death at the Calder Centre — and since 1997 she has kept a personal record of every death among people connected to the Mission. The average age of death is 55 for men and 54 for women. A death every fortnight. In this episode,

Linda talks about what it actually takes to accompany someone through the health system when they are frightened, traumatised, and possibly cognitively affected.

She talks about the Corrections pipeline, the people who are housed but still cannot sleep indoors because the walls themselves are frightening, and why she does not think there is a single patient at the Calder Centre who does not suffer from PTSD. And she talks about what would actually help.

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

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.

In this episode, we meet Kelsi Cox, Supportive Housing Manager at HomeGround — the Auckland City Mission's $100 million integrated housing and health facility in central Auckland.

Kelsi came to Aotearoa from British Columbia on a Rotary scholarship in 2013 and never left. Her background spans international development, public health, the YWCA, the Ministry for Women, the Department of Corrections, and women's refuge — a consistent thread running through all of it: a commitment to supporting wāhine and their whānau to thrive. In this episode,

Kelsi talks about what happens after someone is housed — why that is often when the real challenge begins, and why that is not a failure of the model but the point of it. She talks about the rooftop garden on level nine that tenants built themselves, the whānau committee that meets every week, the gratitude club that runs on Mondays and Fridays, and why none of it was imposed.

She talks about the funding system that sees intertwined needs as separate categories, and why her ask is simple: start with the person, not the funding box.

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

And don't forget to subscribe to the CHA Hub Podcast — wherever you get your podcasts from.

The CHA Hub Podcast is sponsored by our Founding Partner, Westpac New Zealand.