Hoki Whakamuri, Haere Whakamua | thinking back, going forward – our webinars in audio. This webinar, Co-Design for Well-Being: Giving tamariki the best start in life, was hosted in February 2020. We were joined by Angie Tangaere and Dr Penny Hagen from The Southern Initiative who have been working with whānau, community facilities, early child health services and researchers to understand how tamariki can be supported to have the best start in life. Their approach brings together mātauranga, western science and lived experience of whānau to support systems change, and spaces, services and supports that enable tamariki to thrive. At the heart of their work is empowering whānau through an intentional tikanga and neuroscience approach. Whānau lead the co-design process, developing insights and prototypes in response to the issues they identify as important. The approach disrupts traditional service-led, expert-led responses to social challenges and results in new capability, capacity and alternative whānau-led models driven by the outcomes that matter to whānau. There is the potential to reconfigure spaces, services and support systems towards enabling families to connect, to build capability, to feel safe and have time out, to translate knowledge about parenting into their own world and support others in the same in way. Supporting the service system to work with whānau as active participants in their wellbeing can be more challenging than expected. It can require changes to ourselves, our teams, our spaces, our services, our funding, our culture and reporting and ‘measuring’. It can challenge our ideas about what our role is in ‘helping’ families and children. In this webinar, Angie Tangaere and Dr Penny Hagen share key insights about their learnings from this approach, as well as the emerging opportunities and challenges. About the Presenters Angie Tangaere TSI Social Intrapreneur - The Social Initiative Angie Tangaere was born in Papakura and raised in South Auckland with whakapapa to Ngāti Porou on her father’s side and Pākeha from Taranaki on her mother’s side. She graduated with a Law degree from the University of Auckland but decided not to become a lawyer. Angie was keen to work at a community level and took up a role at Te Puni Kokiri working with iwi and Māori trusts in South Auckland. She then worked with the Ministry of Social Development in South Auckland communities looking for ways to develop better services and engagement with communities and whānau. She moved on to a role with Māori health NGO, the National Hauora coalition before coming to work with TSI. She combines her experience with government agencies, community and whānau to develop and co-design whānau-led programmes, disrupting ineffective ‘business as usual’ systems. Dr Penny Hagen Co-Design Lead - The Southern Initiative Over the last 15 years Penny has designed and led a range of participatory and social innovation initiatives in Australia and New Zealand working across community, commercial and academic sectors - with a focus on wellbeing. Penny specialises in projects with social outcomes and provides training and mentoring to design teams and organisations wanting to increase their social impact through the adoption of more participatory design and research approaches. Her practice has increasingly focused on understanding points of integration between health, design, youth development, evaluation, the built environment and policy in order to increase impact around social outcomes. Penny has a PhD in participatory design and is a presenter and reviewer in academic and industry forums. Penny writes and speaks about co-design for youth and whānau wellbeing, social design, ethics and evaluative practices for social innovation and is a keen advocate for growing participatory and social design practices that are of Aotearoa. She is currently Co-design Lead at the Auckland Co-design Lab, helping to build co-design and social innovation capacity across public service and community teams.
