Mad Ave Community Trust specialises in building and implementing a wide range of creative, innovative programmes across the Auckland suburb of Glen Innes, giving rise to community cohesion and wellbeing, and providing learning pathways that strengthen and capitalise on the wisdom of past and future knowledge.
Based on Ngā Kete O Te Wānanga (the three baskets of knowledge), its approach encourages recognition of one’s own innate gifts and vision, and develops the courage to seek and build knowledge to bring about that vision and fulfil one’s greatest potential.
“It’s still really early days but we’re starting to see some really magical things happen. When you empower a young Māori woman in her community, the change that she will make is phenomenal.”
- Veeshayne Patuwai, Co-Director of Mad Ave Community Trust
The Urutapu Tamāhine Programme is a youth leadership project that is drawing on the best of Māori, Western, spiritual and academic worlds to create meaningful, effective tools to empower young Māori women, incorporating both traditional tikanga as well as contemporary leadership models and thinking. The first cohort of ten young women (aged 16 – 19) began their two-year Urutapu leadership journey in 2016, participating in group activities, interactive workshops, physical and mental challenges, and the design and actualisation of individual, self-directed projects that are then realised in their own communities, for the benefit of those communities.
“When I think of what Foundation North’s funding has done, I think of the whakataukī, Mā te huruhuru ka rere te manu – endow the bird with feathers that it may fly.”
-Veeshayne Patuwai, Co-Director of Mad Ave Community Trust
