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.

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!