CHA Hub Podcast

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 —...

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 In...

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 witne...

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 f...

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 e...

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 watche...

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 sys...

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 P...

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 nothin...

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 Correcti...

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 acros...

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 governm...

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...

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 mos...

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...

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...

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 fle...

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...

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 h...

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, reg...

In this episode, we meet Natalia Cleland, Chief Executive of Downtown Community Ministry — A Wellington provider of assertive outreach for people sleeping rough. Natalia came to DCM eight years ago as a social worker, drawn by a job ad that said: if you're ready to roll up your sleeves and do whatever it takes for the most marginalised, this job is for you. A year ago, she became chief executi...

In this episode, we meet Adam, a tenant and peer support worker at HomeGround, Auckland City Mission's supportive housing development in central Auckland. For much of his life, stable housing felt out of reach. During Covid, Adam was placed in emergency accommodation. When a place at HomeGround came up, he took it — and nearly four years on, he hasn't looked back. In this episode, Adam sha...

In this episode, we meet Jade Kake, architect, housing policy advocate, and writer based in Whangarei. Jade trained in architecture and spent time working with a community housing provider in Australia before returning to Aotearoa. A conversation with family drew her into Te Matapihi and the world of Māori housing policy — and set the course for everything that followed. She has spent the years si...

Helen grew up in Wellington, the third of five children, shaped by a family and faith community where caring for others was simply how life was lived. She studied law at Victoria University, spent 15 years at Challenge 2000, worked for Caritas internationally, and arrived at the Auckland City Mission 13 years ago — during the 19th week of a 13-week stand-down, living on a friend's couch in a Q...

In this episode, we meet Amanda Kelly, Policy and Practice Manager at Community Housing Aotearoa. Amanda grew up in a small village in the west of Ireland, where community and care for others were simply part of daily life. After studying health promotion at the National University of Ireland, Galway, she arrived in New Zealand in 2007. Her career has taken her from injury prevention and tobacco c...