Since opening our Regional Centre in the Hawke’s Bay, Raukatauri was made to feel at home in our space at Tamatea High School and Havelocke North Function Centre, where we ran sessions out of from Monday to Saturday. However, with the team growing, and more clients incoming, we have been hankering for a space to call all of our own, which is why we were so excited to be able to find that space in the Taikura House! Read all about our new centre and opening celebration by following the link below.
John McKay has been a musician for as long as he can remember, learning the recorder and ukulele at primary school and then progressing to Highland bagpipes at age 10. However, when John was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2018, he thought that he would need to give up on music and began to sell his large collection of instruments. Since beginning music therapy last year John has gone from strength to strength, and has reconnected with his old bandmates, resumed teaching the bagpipes to local beginners and re-joined his community ukulele group. We’re honoured that John and his community of musicians in Whakatāne are giving back to Raukatauri and hosting an open mic fundraiser at their favourite local, Mata Brewery, during Te Marama Puoro o Aotearoa/NZ Music Month.
One of our most exciting achievements this year was our partnership with the Gattung Family Foundation and The Kate Edgar Educational Charitable Trust to create the KEECT Master of Music Therapy Award. This scholarship supports the full-time study of music therapy for wāhine Māori/Pasifika and includes a full year of music therapy training and a student placement with Raukatauri! We are passionate about encouraging diversity within the music therapy profession, and are thrilled to be a part of this mahi that will enable more Māori and Pasifika women to carry out full-time study for a Master of Music Therapy.
After two years of planning and hard mahi, we are absolutely thrilled to announce that our Bay of Plenty Regional Centre has opened! Planning for the Centre started back in 2020, in response to the many music therapy enquiries that both Raukatauri Music Therapy Trust and Music Therapy NZ had received from the Bay of Plenty community. With a population of over 300,000 people and not a music therapist in sight, the Bay of Plenty definitely felt like the right next step to furthering our mission of providing quality and accessible music therapy to all people, whatever their needs.
With our Northland team growing, we’re delighted to be able to expand our services into the mid and Far North regions, areas which traditionally have been under resourced and under served. Our Northland Regional Centre opened in 2019 with just one location and one music therapist. Now, just three years later, we are proud to boast five team members, two locations, and to be serving over 150 adults and children each week. Find out about our growing Northland team.
Tour Aotearoa is one of the world’s great bikepacking trips: stretching 3,000 km from Cape Reinga to Bluff it follows a combination of cycle trails, tracks, paths and lanes connected by country roads. In March of this year, George Bradfield, co-founder and trustee of Raukatauri, father to Hineraukatauri and husband of Dame Hinewehi Mohi, started the journey to complete the Tour Aoteroa bike ride in order to raise funds for Raukatauri.
As the country headed into another lockdown, Raukatauri once again considered the best ways to support our whānau, clients and Outreach partners during this time. Along with Zoom music therapy sessions and online check ins with our families and clients, we recommenced RaukatauriTunes posting multiple videos every day, a mixture of new, old, and Live content. Our most exciting moment this series of RaukatauriTunes was the guest Happy Hour video filmed just for RaukitauriTunes by NZ legend, singer/songwriter, Anika Moa!
Māori Language Week is the annual campaign led by Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori (The Māori Language Commission) to inspire more New Zealanders to speak, hear, and experience te reo Māori. For Te Wiki o te Reo 2021 we wanted to make most of this opportunity to add to our kete mātauranga (basket of knowledge). Each day we challenged ourselves to engage with te reo Māori in different ways, including learning kupu hou (new words), waiata, quizzing ourselves and discovering our Pepeha.
This year we embarked on an exciting collaboration between music therapy, speech language therapy and Owairaka District School. Raukatauri Music Therapist Xiu Li has been leading a group of six Speech Language Therapy Masters students from the University of Auckland to provide sessions integrating both speech language and music therapy. The feedback from the programme has been overwhelmingly positive, as proven by the Owairaka students who were given the opportunity to describe the group in one word during a recent session. The words they used included, “fun”, “love music”, “love group”, “love teacher”, “feel very relaxed”. We are excited about more opportunities to work collaboratively with others, to extend our repertoire as music therapists and to always advance our skill set to best provide for the whānau and individuals that we work with.
Collaboration was the theme of this year’s Music Therapy New Zealand Symposium, and twelve members of our team travelled to Christchurch this August to join music therapists from all over the nation. In a time when it is easier than ever to become disconnected, this year’s Symposium was a reminder of the power of joining together and the magic that happens when we bring our strengths together in a common goal. The team at Raukatauri are always advocating for music therapy in Aotearoa, and contributing to the research that supports the benefits and effectiveness of music therapy. That’s why we were so proud that four of our Music Therapists were able to present seminars about their work and research.
All of our clients are amazing musicians, but not everyone knows that a few are also incredibly talented visual artists. Zara is one of those artists. At our Grafton Centre, we feel lucky to be able to hang three of her beautiful paintings in our reception area, and our staff and families all love to see the vibrant colours and expressive brushstrokes. Zara’s imagination and bright personality comes through clearly in her paintings in a way that she is not always able to communicate verbally. We are so excited to be able to enjoy her lovely work with her.
Our extraordinary founder is now Dame Hinewehi Mohi for services to Māori, music and television! Because of their disabilities, the individuals who we work often don't have a voice of their own. Hinewehi has used her voice and her public platform to advocate for them and their families tirelessly, providing them with a supportive and creative environment in which to grow, express themselves, reach their potential, and be active and engaged members of a wider community. We know that each of them join us in thanking Hinewehi for the enormous and selfless efforts that she has made on our behalf, and that they are equally thrilled to celebrate this much-deserved recognition of Hinewehi’s determination, advocacy and tireless work!
Raukatauri is coming to the Bay of Plenty in 2022! This move has been in the plans for some time now, and we can't wait to bring our passion and excitement to an area that currently has no music therapy services. The setup of our Bay of Plenty Regional Centre will be funded by The Ministry of Culture and Heritage through their CARE Fund, who have granted us $450,000 over the course of 3 years, which we are extremely grateful for. We think this is an amazing sign of trust in the work that we do, and the importance of the work that we do. Bring on the music!
