2025: Standing in the Tension — Growth, Grit, and the Call to Lead Differently
As we close out 2025, Fathers For Families pauses to reflect, not from a place of comfort, but from a place of conviction.
This year asked more of us as an organisation. It stretched our leadership, tested our systems, and required us to mature, not just in size or structure, but in clarity of purpose. And while the journey held moments of loss and challenge, it also revealed something deeper: our kaupapa is working, our people are growing, and our impact is real.
A Year of Expansion, Depth, and Alignment
One of our most significant achievements in 2025 was the successful expansion of Te Ara Poutama o te Matua Mārama from a 10-week programme to a 14-week, fully accredited Family Violence Intervention Programme. This was not simply an extension of time, it was a deepening of content, follow-up, accountability, and care.
The additional weeks created space for men to slow down, reflect honestly, and practise new ways of being, as men, as partners, and as fathers. It allowed for stronger assessments, more intentional one-to-one support, and safer, more meaningful conversations about responsibility, harm, healing, and legacy.
Alongside this, Fathers For Families strengthened its leadership and workforce pathways through Te Ara Whakamua, our Leadership to Employment programme. Graduates did not just complete a course, they stepped into service, with several moving into co-facilitator and leadership roles, helping to shape the very kaupapa that once held them. This is intergenerational change in motion.
Holding the Lows with Integrity
2025 was not without its challenges. We navigated staff transitions, the loss and departure of valued team members, operational pressure, and the emotional toll that inevitably comes with frontline work in family violence prevention.
Rather than weakening us, these moments forced us to sharpen our systems, strengthen supervision, and reaffirm our values. We learned where our structures needed reinforcing and where our people needed greater care. Importantly, we chose to face these moments with transparency, prayer, and collective responsibility — not avoidance.
Growth, we learned, is rarely tidy.
Why This Work Matters — The Wider Context
While Fathers For Families continued its mahi on the ground, the wider reality in Aotearoa remained confronting. A recent public health briefing highlighted how seasonal increases in alcohol consumption, particularly during holiday periods, are strongly associated with spikes in violence against women and children .
The evidence is clear: alcohol does not cause violence, but it amplifies harm where unhealthy power dynamics, unresolved trauma, and learned behaviours already exist. These patterns disproportionately affect wahine and tamariki and are deeply connected to historical inequity, colonisation, and harmful norms around masculinity .
This context reinforces why Fathers For Families focuses not on surface behaviour alone, but on identity, accountability, emotional regulation, cultural reconnection, and spiritual grounding. Prevention is not reactive — it is relational, intentional, and long-term.
Choosing a Different Path Forward
Throughout 2025, men continued to arrive at Fathers For Families at pivotal moments, after incarceration, relationship breakdowns, loss of access to children, or the painful realisation that the life they were living was no longer sustainable.
What we witnessed again and again was this: when men are met with truth, structure, cultural safety, and belief — change is possible.
Men learned to slow their responses, understand their triggers, and take responsibility for the impact of their actions. Fathers began rebuilding trust with their children. Partners saw the early signs of safer, more accountable behaviour. And alumni stepped forward to walk alongside others, proving that transformation does not end at graduation.
Migrating From 2025 into 2026 — Moving with Clarity, Not Urgency
If 2025 was a year of testing, refining, and strengthening foundations, then 2026 is the year of alignment, consolidation, and purposeful expansion.
We are not carrying everything forward, we are carrying what works.
The lessons of 2025 have sharpened our vision and clarified our priorities. We now move into 2026 with a clearer understanding of who we are as an organisation, what we are uniquely positioned to deliver, and how we sustain impact without burnout, for our staff, our volunteers, or the men and whanau we serve.
A Clearer Organisational Posture
In 2026, Fathers For Families steps forward with a more defined posture:
Depth over volume, prioritising quality engagement, stronger assessment, and longer-term follow-up rather than simply increasing numbers.
Prevention alongside intervention, continuing to support men who use violence while strengthening pathways that stop harm earlier.
Leadership from lived experience, growing alumni into facilitators, mentors, and community leaders who embody transformation, not theory.
Structure that supports sustainability, clearer systems, supervision, governance, and data practices that protect both people and kaupapa.
This clarity allows us to be confident in what we say yes to, and equally confident in what we say no to.
Strengthening Our Core Programmes
In 2026, Te Ara Poutama o te Matua Mārama remains our flagship, now firmly established as a 14-week, accredited, culturally grounded Family Violence Intervention Programme with integrated assessment, follow-up, and tracking.
Alongside this, we continue to strengthen:
Leadership and employment pathways that support men beyond programme completion
Alumni and peer-led support streams that reinforce accountability and belonging
Health and wellbeing initiatives that address physical, emotional, and spiritual regulation
Whanau-centred thinking, recognising that change does not happen in isolation
Rather than launching new ideas prematurely, 2026 is about doing fewer things well, and doing them consistently.
Responding to the Wider Reality with Intentional Action
The societal pressures facing families in Aotearoa are not easing. Seasonal spikes in alcohol-related harm, economic strain, and unresolved trauma continue to place whanau, particularly wahine and tamariki - at risk. (phcc.org.nz)
Our response in 2026 is not reactionary. It is deliberate.
We will continue to address:
the normalisation of harmful masculine norms
the intersection of alcohol, stress, and emotional dysregulation
the long-term impacts of disconnection from identity, culture, and purpose
But we will do so through prevention-focused, culturally anchored, and spiritually grounded approaches that support sustainable behaviour change, not surface compliance.
A Vision Rooted in Responsibility and Hope
Our vision for 2026 is not abstract. It is grounded in what we see every week:
fathers choosing accountability
men learning to pause instead of reacting
whanau beginning to feel safer
leaders emerging from lived experience
We move into 2026 with faith, realism, and resolve — committed to restoring mana, strengthening fathers, and building legacies that interrupt harm rather than inherit it.
The work continues, the responsibility remains and the call is clear.
Quick to listen - Slow to speak - Slow to anger.
With clarity in our direction and confidence in our purpose, Fathers For Families steps into 2026 ready — not rushed — to walk alongside those who are ready to choose a different way forward.
As we close this chapter and prepare to step into the year ahead, we extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who has walked alongside Fathers For Families throughout 2025 — our board, our ceo, staff, volunteers, alumni, partners, funders, and the whanau who place their trust in this work.
We wish you and your loved ones a safe, peaceful, and restorative festive season. May this time bring rest, reflection, and renewed hope — and may the coming year meet you with clarity, strength, and purpose.
From all of us at Fathers For Families, season’s greetings and blessings for the year ahead.