Research Symposium: Te Whatu Raranga | Weaving the threads together
In te ao Māori, raranga | the art of weaving brings together what would otherwise remain separate, creating strength through individual strands.
Earlier this year, alongside the University of Otago – Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, we held a research symposium exploring severe housing deprivation among women. Six presentations brought together different strands of knowledge, experience and insight.
Together, they revealed a pattern: women experiencing severe housing deprivation deserve not just to be counted, but to be heard, believed, housed and supported to lead solutions for themselves, their tamariki and generations to come.
Thread 1: From Whare Tangata to Kāinga Kore
CEWH Kaihautū Dr Kathie Irwin, MNZM, Pūkenga Rangatira, MInstD posed a foundational question during the Symposium: how do we go from Whare Tangata | the womb, the first home, the sacred origin to Kāinga Kore | homelessness?
The answer is not individual failure, but systemic displacement, shaped through policy, legislation and regulation.
Each speaker pulled on this thread:
The history of homelessness was traced to the 1864 raid on Rangiaowhia, the burning of a village and confiscation of land.
Housing policy was described as “exclusion by design” or an “absence of design”.
IDI data challenged the “hard to reach” narrative, showing people were reaching out for help but systems were failing to connect them with support.
Mapping revealed how wāhine navigate Wellington’s geography to find fragments of safety.
Manaaki Rangatahi documented a care-to-homelessness pipeline.
The National Homelessness Data Project found system gaps across every ministry surveyed.
If policy, legislation and regulation have helped create homelessness, they can also help create housing justice.
Thread 2: Relationships can both harm and heal
A recurring theme was that relationships are where change happens – or fails to happen.
Safety for wāhine rough sleeping is relational before it is structural: the familiar face of a library worker, the nod from a security guard, the trust built through repeated, non-judgemental contact.
One researcher titled their PhD "A Renegotiation of Relationships", finding that every level of Housing First implementation – between people and services, providers, communities and landlords, and the Crown and Māori – required relationships to change before outcomes could.
At Mā Te Huruhuru, a marae framework transfers tikanga and kawa into the housing environment, resulting in zero police callouts and near-complete transition to permanent housing. This is not simply a programme outcome; it is a relationship outcome, grounded in ancestral wisdom.
But if relationships are where healing happens, they are also where harm compounds.
The finding in "He Whare, He Taonga: Hauraki Wāhine and the Fight for Housing Sovereignty" (Paora Moyle, 2026) that the systemic violence of government agencies had a greater impact on wāhine than violence at home revealed a double layering of harm: where the system designed to support you becomes the system that entraps you.
In Housing First, providers described caseloads of 1:40 where the design called for 1:20. Rangatahi described being released from state care into homelessness.
The thread of relationship carries a challenge for the sector itself. It was named directly that refuges that close their doors to gang-affiliated women are making a relationship choice - deciding whose mana they will uphold and whose they will not.
If fragmentation across policy, services, data and relationships is part of the problem, then the solution that emerged most consistently from the day was the power of collective action.
Thread 3: Wāhine Māori at the centre
Across every dataset, every pūrākau, and every analytical framework presented, wāhine Māori
were at the centre of the crisis - and at the centre of the solutions:
73% of the Housing First cohort
66% of wāhine in Hauraki emergency housing
76% of the women in the Housing First gender analysis
Two in five people presenting to homelessness services nationally, are women
The overwhelming majority of rangatahi in the Manaaki Rangatahi data were also wāhine Māori.
Women represent more than two in five people presenting to homelessness services nationally, and wāhine Māori are disproportionately represented within that group.
The symposium demonstrated that wāhine Māori are not simply the population most affected - they are the population holding the most compelling solutions.
The Papatūānuku Paradigm is a gender analysis framework built from mātauranga Māori.
The Mā Te Huruhuru model is a housing programme founded on the lived experience of its CEO and grounded in the marae.
Te Whāriki's research methodology represents original contributions to research practice.
The Wellington lived experience research was conducted through kaupapa Māori methodology that directly influenced council policy.
In every case, the approach was not an adaptation of a mainstream model for a Māori audience, it was an indigenous creation that demonstrated broader applicability.
Thread 4: Tamariki cannot wait
Children were present in every presentation - not as a separate topic but as inseparable from the housing outcomes of the women who care for them.
The 858 children in the Housing First cohort, 80% with Māori caregivers.
The sole parent benefit received by 79% of women in the cohort.
The wāhine in Hauraki refuge whose four-year-old son calls it "home" because he has never known another.
The rangatahi who said they would rather be at home learning their pepeha than on the streets popping cars.
The entire kaupapa of Mā Te Huruhuru is grounded in the whakatauki "He manu hou ahau, he pi ka rere" - I am a fledgling, a young bird learning to fly.
Every delay in housing women is a delay in securing a child's future. Every policy that makes
housing harder for women makes childhood harder for tamariki. The move-on orders, the
emergency housing restrictions, the Kāinga Ora waiting lists - these are not abstract policy settings. They are decisions about children's lives.
Since the symposium and the creation of the Research Symposium Paper, the Coalition to End Women's Homelessness released our research Children and Young People Experiencing Homelessness.
Thread 5: The data tension
The research symposium surfaced a productive and important tension around data.
On one side, the Housing First outcomes and the National Homelessness Data Project demonstrated the power of data to prove what works, to hold government accountable, and to build a credible evidence base for advocacy. Data was described as a taonga. Analysis using the IDI showed definitively that housing saves lives.
On the other side, it was challenged that these are whānau “being tracked and surveilled and datified” - and that when government pushes data collection onto community organisations without governance, funding, or accountability, it is an act of extraction, not partnership.
It was also asked whether ethnicity data captures the difference between Māori living in their tribal hinterland with access to cultural infrastructure and Māori living as strangers in another iwi’s rohe - a distinction that fundamentally shapes what support is available.
The planned discontinuation of the census sits at the intersection of these tensions.
Without the current form of census, women in hidden forms of homelessness - shared accommodation, severely crowded dwellings etc - become harder to count. It was warned that the proposed new census model risks fining organisations for not providing data while failing to fund the collection - a renegotiation of relationships in precisely the wrong direction.
With thanks to League of Live Illustrators for their illustrations.
If you want to take action, please sign and send the CEWH Open Letter, which calls for a national, Te Tiriti-based strategy to end women’s homelessness.
