How our Vision and Mission relate to our services

Domestic abuse is a huge problem in New Zealand. And there is less money to go around than ever before. So many people need help and support, and many of these people, particularly women and children, are in great danger. The numbers of people asking us for help each year continues to grow. By responding to this huge need, it would be easy to spread ourselves so thin that we would be ineffectual.

Now more than ever, we need to be smart about how we tackle such a huge problem. In order to maximize our impact, we have made some clear decisions about what we will and will not do. Many organizations provide excellent services in various parts of the country. All of us struggle to obtain sufficient resources, so we have no intention of trying to compete with these local services.

We will only expand our direct service provision where we will not be duplicating an existing service and where a service is needed that we have the capacity to provide, either by ourselves or in partnership with others.

It is important to ensure that people needing support, information and advice are able to obtain this irrespective of where they live. For this reason our Helpline is a national service.

We continue to provide crisis services in Auckland, but our purpose in doing so is now twofold. Obviously we still do this to help victims of domestic abuse become safer. But our other purpose now is to trial new ideas and new ways of working, ultimately in order to make more of an impact on the lives of these victims. We do this because we know that, as a country, we will not get very far in solving this problem if we all keep doing what we’ve always been doing.

Providing our services involves an ongoing process of review and analysis, followed by making large and small changes in order to continually improve on our effectiveness. Much of this review involves listening to our clients so that we understand what they need in order to become safe and recover from abuse, and how effective our services are at meeting this need. This constant evolution means that we are working in quite different ways than we were even a year ago.

We want our advocacy services to be effective for all clients, which is a challenge in a city as diverse as Auckland, as we know that needs vary for clients from different cultural groups, age groups, and religious background; clients who live with a disability or a mental illness; clients from lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender communities, etc.

We learn from others doing similar work both in New Zealand and overseas through nurturing relationships with other domestic abuse experts, including making trips overseas to see successful projects firsthand. We look at how these projects have been evaluated and why they have been deemed successful. Again, we are looking for maximum impact on the lives of victims of abuse, particularly in terms of safety.

We do not simply continue to improve our own services. Perhaps more importantly, we aim to make a significant contribution to the spread of ideas about what works to other parts of the country and beyond. As we’ve grown, our ability to make an impact on a larger scale has also grown, hence we have become more effective at spreading new ideas. We can and do now contribute in this way in New Zealand and also internationally.

We do this by delivering seminars and training for professionals, undertaking research, producing how-to manuals, making policy submissions, supporting other New Zealand organisations, hosting overseas delegations, delivering our message and ideas through the media, and so on.

It is also clear to us that what works to stop domestic abuse often involves working in partnership with other organizations — both government agencies and community organizations. Developing these partnerships is a key component of achieving our mission.

We take very seriously our commitment to Te Tiriti O Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi), and see this commitment as being very complementary to our Vision, Values and Mission. In other words, we believe that by actively honouring Te Tiriti, we will provide a better service for Māori clients. We do this through ongoing implementation of our Māori Strategy, and with the guidance and assistance of our Māori Advisory Group.

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