Where Mana Thrives, Communities Rise: Returning Power, Restoring Mana, Redefining Recovery is a provocative keynote that challenges dominant mental health paradigms and calls for a fundamental reimagining of trauma, healing, and responsibility. Grounded in kaupapa Māori worldviews and the lived experience–led practice of Mana o te Tangata Trust, this presentation asserts that trauma is not solely an individual experience, but a collective and systemic reality shaped by colonisation, inequity, and risk-averse system design.

The keynote confronts the uncomfortable truth that mental health systems can themselves retraumatise silencing lived experience, marginalising culture, and mistaking compliance for recovery. It reframes recovery as a collective, relational, and cultural process that restores mana, reconnects identity, and returns power to whānau and communities. Peer-led, culturally grounded approaches are positioned not as optional enhancements, but as essential foundations for genuine healing and transformation.

Through courageous truth-telling, wisdom from practice, and strategic insight, this session invites leaders, practitioners, and policymakers to move beyond symbolic inclusion and incremental reform toward bold, values-driven systems change. It is a call to action to centre Indigenous knowledge, trust lived experience leadership and replace compliance with courage so that wellbeing is nurtured, dignity restored, and hope reclaimed.

Three Key Learnings:
1. Reframing trauma: from individual pathology to collective and systemic responsibility

Attendees will deepen their understanding of trauma as a product of colonisation, inequity, and system design not personal failure. This learning reframes recovery as a collective, cultural, and relational process, and challenges systems to acknowledge their role in both harm and healing.

2. Restoring mana through lived experience and kaupapa Māori leadership

Attendees will explore how culturally grounded, peer-led approaches restore mana, strengthen identity, and create authentic pathways to wellbeing. This learning moves beyond tokenistic inclusion, positioning lived experience and Indigenous knowledge as essential foundations for effective, humane mental health systems.

3. Practising courage: shifting power, culture, and accountability in mental health systems

Attendees will be challenged to move beyond compliance and risk aversion toward bold, values-driven leadership. This learning offers practical insight into how organisations and leaders can redistribute power, partner genuinely with communities, and enable system change that prioritises dignity, self-determination, and collective wellbeing.