Te Rito Maioha Early Childhood New Zealand
Building the foundations for an organisation-wide approach to sustainability.
My work with Te Rito Maioha began with a simple question: how could sustainability become something the whole organisation could understand, contribute to and ultimately help bring to life?
What followed has become an ongoing, multi-year collaboration. Brought in as an external sustainability consultant and facilitator, I’ve worked alongside staff, senior leadership and governance to help turn existing impact and ambition into a more connected, strategic approach to sustainability.
The mahi so far
It started with 1,400 colourful beads.
At Te Rito Maioha’s staff hui, every staff member painted a bead in the colour of the Sustainable Development Goal they felt most called to action. Those individual commitments were woven together into one collective artwork, a visual representation of shared impact that now hangs at Te Rito Maioha’s Wellington head office.
Then we mapped what was already there.
Through an organisation-wide SDG Matrix, we mapped existing initiatives and activity against Te Rito Maioha’s priority SDGs, creating a snapshot of where impact was already happening and where there was opportunity to go further.
From insight came direction.
Through ongoing workshops and hui with the Senior Leadership Team, we explored the findings, challenged and refined our thinking, and began turning a broad ambition for sustainability into a clearer long-term direction.
And direction needed foundations.
From there, I supported the collaborative development and refinement of the key strategic documents and long-term action planning needed to give the work structure and a pathway forward.
Now, it’s about bringing it to life.
The mahi continues. The next phase is focused on taking those foundations out into the organisation, sharing the work with staff, launching the Sustainability Hub and introducing new groups, resources and activations that will help turn strategy into sustained action.
My approach
Serious strategy doesn’t have to feel serious.
This project captures the kind of consulting work I love most: moving between strategic thinking and creative engagement. One day that might mean analysing organisational activity or facilitating a detailed workshop with senior leaders. Another might mean putting 1,400 beads into people’s hands and asking them to think differently about the impact they want to make. My role is to bring structure, an external perspective and creative facilitation to the process, while drawing out the knowledge, experience and ideas already within the organisation. Because ultimately, this hasn’t been about creating something for Te Rito Maioha. It’s been about helping Te Rito Maioha create something that is genuinely theirs.
A particularly special partnership
There is also a personal reason this mahi means so much to me.
During my time working with Te Rito Maioha, I became a mum myself and experienced early childhood education from an entirely new perspective. At the same time, I experienced first-hand the kind of organisation Te Rito Maioha strives to champion. When I had my first baby, they met that enormous change in my life with trust, flexibility, flowers and genuine encouragement. They never made me feel that becoming a mother somehow made me less capable of continuing the work we had started together. I shared that experience publicly at the time, and the response to the story was extraordinary. For me, though, it simply reinforced something this project has continually demonstrated: values matter most when you can see them in action. (You can read the LinkedIn post that went a bit viral here).
That is one of the many reasons I feel incredibly proud of what we have built together.
