About Us

RainbowYOUTH is a registered charity, we work with young rainbow youth aged 13-27 and provide holistic peer support. We’re about fostering safe, inclusive, accepting and diverse environments that are sober, family friendly spaces. Scroll through to read about our values, strategies and constitution.

Whāia tō ake ngākaunui, i te pono, i te mārama.

Know who you are, be who you are.

Our motto, gifted by Tīwhanawhana Trust

Our values/ kaupapa

For youth, by youth

Our services, groups, events and organisation are made for youth, and are led by youth.

Affirming and empowering young people from all walks of life.

We affirm and empower young people of all abilities, religions, countries, communities and backgrounds.

Proactively and respectfully honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi

As the founding document, we recognise the importance of honouring Te Tiriti, and are incorporating this into our kaupapa, our work and our organisation.

Strengths-based advocacy

We know that our young people are brave, resilient, courageous, generous, and so many other great things. We advocate for and with them by focusing on those strengths.

Young people determine their journey

We know that young people are the experts when it comes to what they need and want, and we create the space for them to make that happen.

Our 2024 strategy

  • While most young people come to us for support, we want them to leave us with skills and tools to be successful in their lives. Some of the areas we intend to work on to achieve this include:

    • Building power for young people to be active advocates within their communities and for themselves.

    • Creating opportunities for young people to develop new skills.

    • Developing more employment support - both for getting young people into jobs, and advocacy for them at their workplace.

    • Utilising our corporate partnerships for opportunities for donations of knowledge and expertise in this area.

  • Our communities need RainbowYOUTH to be a place where they can have their whole identity seen and uplifted. We intend to focus on this over the next three years across these areas:

    • Focus on partnerships and collaborations to enable intersectional work within Māori, Pacific, migrant and disabled communities.

    • Prioritise multicultural responsiveness through our services and staff and volunteer training.

    • Building Te Tiriti led activism in rainbow communities through education and community building.

  • Our regional work has emerged over the last ~6 years and we have a lot of learnings to incorporate into a sustainable model of service provision in the regions. We have three key areas to focus on:

    • Development of a long term model/models of our work in the regions (led by local communities)

    • Presence of regional rainbow voices in our communications, advocacy and governance

    • Ongoing development of our regional services in response to the needs of local communities.

  • We’ve had consistent feedback that it’s hard to find out about our services, and people wish they had known earlier. We want it to be easy for young people and whānau to find out about us and get in touch. We also recognise we need to be accountable to our communities about exactly what we’re doing, and how we’re using the generous donations and funding we receive. We have a few focusses to progress this area:

    • Transparency around our funding and internal work

    • Proactive use of media to advocate for issues faced by rainbow young people

    • Outcomes we deliver for young people are publicised

    • RainbowYOUTH is visible and present in relevant spaces and events

    • RainbowYOUTH resources are easily and widely accessible

Our Constitution

Our constitution lays out the 'rules' of how RainbowYOUTH functions as an Incorporated Society.