Who We Are?

Ethnic Health Collective is a politically independent consortium that seeks to inform, support and challenge government health policy, strategy, and investment for ethnic communities. While we will function as a traditional health think tank, employing research, data, and whānau voices to influence decision-makers, what sets us apart is our strong roots in the community and that we are community-led and driven. We are not a service delivery organisation but a platform that is led collectively and seeks to catalyse change and transformation. All our actions and interventions focus on informing policy, growing knowledge, system change, learning, and collaboration.

Our Vision

Ethnic Communities achieve health equity, live healthy lives, and thrive in Aotearoa.

OUR PURPOSE

We will be an independent, bold, and trusted voice on ethnic health policy and service design by

Forming a collective voice for ethnic communities, including bringing people together to tell their stories and facilitate meaningful discussion on relevant issues.

Advocating for equity in health investment and outcomes for ethnic communities.

Developing, connecting, and recognising the Ethnic Health Workforce.

Gathering and promoting research, data, evidence, insights, and new ideas.

OUR VALUES

Respect

We will maintain mutual respect for all and demonstrate compassion in all our relationships.

Excellence

We will strive to have excellence in everything we do to serve our ethnic communities.

Bold

We will be independent and bold to maximise our impact.

Integrity

We will take responsibility, stand by what we say, keep the trust given to us and be sincere in everything we do.

Our Approach

Ethnic Communities

For the collective's work, we acknowledge the diversity, complexity and intersectionality of identities and experiences. Consequently, we have decided not to define ethnicity in any fixed or exclusive way. Our primary focus will be on individuals who identify their ethnicity as African, Asian, Latin-American, and Middle Eastern while also working with other groups who face marginalisation. This will include new and temporary migrants, former refugees, asylum seekers, long-term settlers, and those born in New Zealand. We are committed to establishing partnerships with other groups that face inequities in health outcomes and working with them for overall health and well-being in Aotearoa.

Long-term approach

Our inaugural Strategic Plan lays the foundation for our long-term commitment to making a meaningful impact. The focus of the work outlined in our inaugural Strategic Plan has a two-year timespan. However, the outcomes have been developed with a long-term focus, and it will take sustained, multi-faceted action to further the vision we have outlined.

Knowledge is available to everyone.

The knowledge we create through collaborative insight gathering, learning, and development of solutions to improve health and outcomes for the growing ethnic communities of Aotearoa is available to everyone (including non-members). This knowledge is a valuable resource for navigating the complexity of our issues.

Supporting our members

Members are at the heart of the Ethnic Health Collective and are central to the development of our work. Our members are working to enhance health and well-being in Aotearoa and are committed to achieving equitable health outcomes for ethnic communities. Supporting our members will facilitate organisational development and collaboration, which, in turn will enable us to influence system change to create better outcomes for whānau and communities.
We will support our members through learning spaces, workshops, mind labs (topic-focused discussion and working groups), research dissemination, data analytics, insight gathering, and collaborative learning to enhance their day-to-day work.

Building an Ethnic Health and Well-Being Ecosystem

We do not see ourselves as a peak organisation for ethnic communities, rather we are a platform that facilitates building of an Ethnic Health and well-being ecosystem. We recognise that many groups and organisation need to flourish and grow to represent the diversity within the ethnic communities and support all such formal and informal groups and individuals and invite them to become members.

Our Strategic Plan

Our Plan is developed with a focus on a long-term approach, and we will continue strengthening it. The plan will be a live document, and we commit to reviewing it annually with a complete review in June 2025, two years after its launch. Our plan has been ambitious, though we are still in the establishment stage of the Ethnic Health Collective. The plan includes our aspirational outcomes and the key initiatives we will undertake to achieve them. The plan establishes our purpose, values, and principles while providing an outcome framework guiding how we will reach our vision.

During the year, we will focus on developing a specific criterion that we will use to evaluate the collective’s progress, develop our engagement approach to reach our objectives, refine, and do further work on our values, principles, and approach, and create a more specific action plan. As we begin the execution of our plan, we will continuously learn from our experiences and make enhancements to the plan to ensure its effectiveness.

Strategic Plan 2023 Click Here A3 Strategic Plan Click Here

Our Work