In this episode, we meet Murray Edridge, Wellington City Missioner and the ordained Anglican priest — Baptist by whakapapa, he'll tell you — who has spent eight years walking alongside some of Wellington's most vulnerable people.

Murray came to the Mission almost by accident, turning down the role before accepting it, and has since grown it into an organisation of 275 staff operating across six facilities in the Wellington region.

In this episode, Murray talks about what it really means to believe that every person is unshakably good — and how that single idea shapes everything from the Mission's housing philosophy to the way staff respond when someone behaves badly. He talks about the homelessness coordination collective he helped build with Downtown Community Ministries and Hei Ringakura, why he refuses to respond to government tenders, and why he is deeply anxious about move-on orders. He also talks about Dennis — a man who came through the Mission on a very hard road and now works there as a peer support person, one of their best. And he makes the case that if we want to solve homelessness in New Zealand, we need to start not with housing policy, but with the first thirty months of a child's life.

We'd like to thank Murray 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 Nicola Fleming, Housing First Programme Manager at Christchurch Methodist Mission.

Nicola came to this work through 20 years at Kāinga Ora — from the West Coast to Aranui in Christchurch, and then through the Canterbury earthquakes, going door to door in the red zone. What she found along the way was a conviction that real change happens at street level, not from a government desk.

In this episode, Nicola talks about what Housing First actually looks like on the ground in Christchurch — who qualifies, how the outreach team finds people nobody has ever counted, and why recovery takes years, not months. She talks about the health gap her team identified and what they did about it, and why she believes Housing First is not a housing programme at all. It is a recovery programme.

We'd like to thank Nicola 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 Professor Nevil Pierse, Research Professor at the University of Otago Wellington, where he has spent more than two decades building New Zealand's evidence base on homelessness.

Nevil is a statistician by inclination — and the first to say that the most important data point is never a number. It is the story behind it. His work with the People's Project in Hamilton tracked 400 people who had been sleeping rough on the city's streets, and found that before anyone thought to house them, they had collectively generated more than 200,000 recorded interactions with government services. Not hidden people. Not hard to reach. A total systems failure.

In this episode, Nevil talks about what the data actually shows about who is homeless in New Zealand, why housing is the most effective mental health intervention available, and what Finland's experience proves about what's possible when political will matches the evidence. He also makes the case for why counting everyone matters — and what we stand to lose if we stop.

We'd like to thank Professor Nevil Pierse 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 Professor Peter Mackie, Executive Director of the Institute of Global Homelessness.

Peter didn't set out to reshape how countries respond to homelessness. As a professor at Cardiff University, he led the research that informed the Housing (Wales) Act 2014 — the legislation that made homelessness prevention a legal duty and drew international attention as one of the most significant reforms of its kind. A decade on, the law he helped build is part of the conversation everywhere he goes.

In this episode, Peter talks about what it actually took to shift a country's approach from responding to homelessness after it happens, to being legally required to act before it does. He reflects on what that model has achieved, where it falls short, and what it reveals about what's possible when political will matches the evidence. And he makes the case that homelessness has become normalised in ways that should be utterly unacceptable — and that COVID showed us exactly what's possible when a society decides something matters.

We'd like to thank Professor Peter Mackie 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 Bruce Ford — community advocate, former Southland District Councillor, and the driving force behind the Stewart Island Seniors Cottage Trust.

Bruce has lived on Stewart Island since 1968. He knows everyone. And for years he has watched proud, independent people — the fishing families who built this community over generations — quietly struggle in ways that never appear on a government spreadsheet. They don't register for housing support. They manage. Until a medical event takes them off the island and into elder care in Invercargill, where, as Bruce puts it simply, they give up.

In this episode, Bruce talks about what it takes to build a housing solution from scratch in a remote community that doesn't appear on any government priority list — six small cottages, modest and practical, designed to keep people home. He talks about six years of fundraising, rattling on doors in Wellington, and why the model he's building could work for small communities right across the country.

We'd like to thank Bruce 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 Brook Turner, Director of Partnerships at Visionwest in West Auckland.

Brook didn't come to homelessness through a housing career. He came through youth development — and through the ten young people his team found living under the Henderson Bridge in the first week of opening a creative youth centre in West Auckland. All Māori. All recently discharged from the justice system into nothing. That moment set the course for everything that followed.

In this episode, Brook makes the case for early intervention as the most powerful lever against adult homelessness, and for going unconditional — on housing, on people, on the commitment to solve this. He talks about what it actually takes to sustain a tenancy long term, why Housing First is a philosophy not just a programme, and why the system keeps building stopgaps when what's needed is a fundamentally different decision.

We'd like to thank Brook 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 Millie Lambess, City Safety and Harm Prevention Team Lead at Wellington City Council.

Millie came to this work through community — through a belief in high-trust models, flexible funding, and the idea that the best responses start from what people actually need, not what the system is designed to offer. She began at council as a community connector during COVID, with a flexi fund and the autonomy to respond to whatever whānau needed. That experience shaped everything that followed.

In this episode, Millie talks about Wellington City Council's role as connector and convener across the homelessness sector — and why local government is often better placed than anyone to see the full picture. She talks about the research into women's rough sleeping in Wellington's CBD, what those women said about safety, storage, and what home actually means, and why success doesn't always look the way we expect it to.

We'd like to thank Millie 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 Sehai Orgad, Senior Responsible Officer for City Safety at Wellington City Council.

Sehai came to this work through the community — and through a conviction that homelessness and city safety are two different problems that require two different responses. The person sleeping rough on a Wellington street is not a threat to the person walking by. The person sleeping rough is more unsafe than the passerby. That distinction, simple as it sounds, is politically significant — and it shapes everything Wellington City Council's approach is built on.

In this episode, Sehai talks about the Wellington Homelessness Coordination Service, why bringing mental health and addiction services into the room was the game changer, and what four and five-hour deep-dive case reviews actually reveal about the people the system has found hardest to reach. She makes the case for coordination over new money — and for knowing people by name before things escalate.

We'd like to thank Sehai 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 Vic Crockford — co-lead of the Coalition to End Women's Homelessness, and former Chief Executive of Community Housing Aotearoa.

Vic came to this work through her grandmother — a single mother who fled a violent relationship, secured state housing in Hastings, and in doing so changed the trajectory of her family's life. Vic has known since she was young how much a home matters for children to flourish. Decades later, that understanding has become the engine of her advocacy.

In this episode, Vic talks about what the research revealed — that women make up just over half of all people experiencing severe housing deprivation in this country, a figure most New Zealanders would find surprising. She talks about what makes women's homelessness distinct, why the wave building among older women is one the system is nowhere near ready for, and what a genuine women's homelessness strategy would actually look like.

We'd like to thank Vic 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 Dr Kathie Irwin — scholar, senior public servant, and Kaihautū of the Coalition to End Women's Homelessness in Aotearoa.

Kathie is a third-generation Māori feminist educator, and she brings to this conversation decades of hard-won analysis about why wāhine Māori arrive at 65 without economic security — not by chance, but by design. Three generations of legislation, regulation, and policy, layered on top of one another, pointing women toward the lowest-paid sectors of the labour market and keeping them there.

In this episode, Kathie traces that machinery with precision — from the 1847 Education Ordinance to today's retirement income policy — and asks what it would take to undo it. She talks about the power of capitalising the family benefit as a housing deposit, the vision of urban papakāinga as a genuine alternative to individualised housing solutions, and why New Zealand doesn't need to import new ideas. The answers, she argues, are already here.

We'd like to thank Dr Kathie Irwin 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.