By Johan Kettle, Respectful Relationships Coordinator, InsideOUT Kōaro
Over the past year, a collective of us from InsideOUT Kōaro and RainbowYOUTH came together to co-create a respectful relationships programme for rainbow rangatahi across Aotearoa, with support from the Rainbow Violence Prevention Network and Te Puna Aonui.
What a spectacular task before us.
Everyone involved brought with them valuable lived experience and the learnings and dreams we all shared to provide our rangatahi greater possibility for safe, loving and respectful relationships.
Aro ki te hā is a programme born from an ever-present need to provide support and education to address the specific ways we experience violence within our rainbow communities. It is a six week wandering to explore ways to come into respectful relationship with whenua, self and each other.
Aro ki te hā addresses our location within the settler colony of New Zealand and its impacts on what we are taught about relationship. Not just our romantic relationships but what it means to be in relationship at all. We look at the ways systematic oppression shows up in our relationships and how they might recruit us into harmful ways of relating. We look towards what safe, loving and liberating forms of relating can look like and how to be in a practice of safe love – from the love of the whenua we are living on, to our relationships with ourselves, our whānau, friends, romantic partners and our communities.
Without many resources, our communities have been self-organising rainbow specific relationship education for many, many years. We acknowledge the anti-violence leaders, teachers, organisers, and healers who have created a pathway to allow for this kaupapa. Some of whom we may not know the names of, but whose legacies are most certainly felt.
Aro ki te hā will be piloted later this year as a six-week programme (primarily delivered online at this stage) and it is our hope to receive funding to further develop the programme in-person.
This programme has been shaped by a magnificent rōpū of young people that advised and shared decision making around the program’s content and delivery. We have created a collective document shared here; Tentacular Kōrero to gift back as a taonga to them for their contributions and to share with you all our journey together. Inside this document lives the stories, whakaaro, kōrero and mauri we shared over six months – facilitated and led by Te Wheke. A huge mihi to all the rangatahi involved (you know who you are), you are all bioluminescent queer rainbow brilliance – what an honour to listen and be enchanted by your stories, wisdom and curiosities. We also mihi to Whaea Rangimarie Davis for her cultural guidance and awhi; to Jill Faulkner for generously sharing her narrative expertise and wisdom and finally to Yujin Shien for bringing the document to life with their illustrations and design. Thank you.
There is also an informal research output that we wish to share open source with and for the betterment of our communities. May the knowledge shared support better opportunities for rainbow people to be held, loved and cared for in warm, nurturing ways; Aro ki te hā research report
This programme has been founded on and grown by relationship. These documents invite our wider community into our process and in intention, demonstrate a commitment to accountability and transparency. If you wish to provide feedback of any flavour, please email Dando at dando@insideout.org.nz.