We first wrote about Te Weu Tairāwhiti in December, just after their inaugural grant from The Climatics. We were excited to support climate action rooted in community, in land, in mātauranga, in the lived experience of a region already bearing the weight of a changing climate.
Four months on, we caught up with Naomi and Renee to hear what's been happening.
Still on the ground.
Tairāwhiti is one of the most climate-exposed regions in Aotearoa. This January, severe storms brought flooding and landslides across the Gisborne District, cutting off communities along the East Coast, closing SH35 and the road through the gorge, and leaving The East Cape particularly hard hit. A state of emergency was declared.
This wasn't a one-off. NIWA recorded an extremely active summer weather pattern driven by La Niña, with significant events across all three months of the season. It's the continuation of something Tairāwhiti has been living with since long before Cyclone Gabrielle. It’s a region on the front lines, dealing with compounding impacts that persist between recovery efforts.
Te Weu's people are part of these communities. When the January storms hit, some of them assessed damage on their own whenua, and headed home to be alongside those who needed support. It's that proximity - knowing what's at stake, who's carrying it, and what's needed - that makes their climate mahi so grounded and necessary.
Into new rooms
One of the clearest things to emerge from our conversation was how much Te Weu's reach has expanded this year, and what’s helped make that possible.
Before this funding, Naomi described a limited capacity to engage proactively in proposal development. Not for lack of ambition, but because doing it properly requires resources, and those resources weren't available. Project and proposal development is part of the funding ecosystem that isn’t usually accounted for.
Having an unrestricted grant under their feet meant they could properly resource their engagement in new proposals, and turn up to conversations equipped and available, building projects that are meaningful for everyone involved. That foundation helped to unlock further opportunities that simply didn’t feel within reach before.
From Tairāwhiti to the world
Te Weu's reach is extending internationally too. Renee, in her role with the International Environmental Guardianship, has been involved in discussions in Brussels focused on the emergence of nature markets, working to ensure that indigenous communities have a strong voice in how those markets are designed, at the protocol level, from the beginning. Her observation was that very few people in this space are working at both the community and international levels simultaneously. Te Weu is doing both.
A significant research collaboration with partners in Canada is also developing; this will be a multi-country project exploring displacement in communities across different knowledge systems. Rather than accepting the default role of community case study, Te Weu pushed for stronger representation at the senior research level and will be helping shape the project's direction.
While relationships are extended beyond our shores through research and international advocacy and collaboration, they are grounded in Te Tairāwhiti.
Wāhine and rangatahi are leading this
Something unexpected and important has emerged through Te Weu's mahi, a strong wahine and rangatahi leadership presence that has grown organically from the work itself. Many of them māmā carrying an enormous range of kaupapa alongside their work with Te Weu. Rangatahi too have grown into serious research and leadership roles that is quickly becoming one of Te Weu's greatest strengths.
The team is growing with intention. Te Weu has new kaimahi and new trustees supporting the kaupapa. As the team grows, so does capacity but more than that, it helps to grow the ability to think collectively, to connect across the mahi, and to dream up new initiatives that couldn't emerge from siloed or individual thinking alone. New collaborations are being nurtured and supported.
Te Weu is also celebrating kaimahi Dayna Raroa, who has just completed her Masters of Creative Design after successfully designing and holding the Mowai Exhibition last year. Her pathway there ran directly through the projects she'd been doing with Te Weu: from community research to creative practice to academic examination. That's a sign of the Te Weu kaupapa working exactly as intended.
And then there is a group of rangatahi who are leading an exchange to Chile, where they will learn how communities there are navigating climate change and environmental kaupapa and bring those learnings back to Tairāwhiti. Mapping all of the roles and responsibilities (both formal and informal) that this group holds stretches across a broad range of climate change resilience and adaptation initiatives that are deeply grounded in place and the people of those places.
That question is now alive within Te Weu's kōrero: how do we properly support what our wāhine and rangatahi are carrying?
What your funding is doing
The Climatics' grant to Te Weu was unrestricted and trust-based.
What that trust has done, in practice, is give Te Weu the foundation to move into new proposals, new collaborations and new rooms. A new sense of spaciousness has opened up, to look beyond the immediate work and engage with what's possible. And from that spaciousness, momentum is building in ways that go well beyond the grant itself.
Unrestricted funding is rare in Aotearoa's philanthropic landscape. When it arrives at the right moment, it compounds. You can see that happening at Te Weu. And community-led, Māori-led climate action in a region like Tairāwhiti, which is already on the frontline, doing the hard mahi, building something, is exactly where it needs to go.
This is work worth backing. Thanks to the generosity of our community at The Climatics, it's happening.
