Kōkiri Rising · a monthly gathering for change-makers
What if the system could heal too?
A donation-based gathering for women who work inside the structures that shape our lives — and who are ready to imagine, together, how they could hold us better.
Join the waitlistWhy this matters
We keep healing people, then sending them back into what broke them.
The nurse restored on a weekend retreat returns to a ward that's short three staff. The social worker finds her breath again, then walks back into a caseload no human could carry. The mother does the inner work, then meets the same housing queue, the same waitlist, the same closed door.
Individual healing matters. It's the work I've given my life to. But on its own, it can only ever manage the damage of a system that keeps producing it.
Kōkiri Rising is an attempt to treat the system, so the people living inside it can be more free.
If Dancing with the Shadow strengthens the self, Kōkiri Rising turns toward the structures around it. Both, together, are the whole of the work.
The world we're imagining
Before we can build something different, we have to be able to picture it.
Every gathering holds a quiet question: what would it look like if our systems were designed to keep people well, instead of keeping them going?
Reciprocal
Where what we give is met, and care flows in both directions — not drawn from the same tired few.
Collaborative
Where the people closest to the problem are in the room where the decisions are made.
Regenerative
Where systems restore the people and the land they depend on, rather than using them up.
Integrated
Where body, mind, community and Country are treated as one living whole, not separate departments.
Redistributive
Where resources, power and voice move toward those who have long gone without them.
Anti-oppressive
Where we keep asking whose voices are centred, whose are missing — and what our own positions ask of us.
Why I'm calling this in
I kept watching women heal, then walk back into the fire.
For years I've held rooms where women put down what they'd been carrying. I've watched them soften, cry, laugh, and remember who they are. And then I've watched many of them walk straight back into workplaces, care systems and family structures that took it all out of them again.
At the same time, studying psychology, I kept meeting the same gap: between what the theory promises and what people actually meet in practice. Between the policy and the person on the other side of the desk.
I carry two lineages — Māori and English — whose ancestors once met as enemies. Part of my life's work is to be a bridge where there was once a war. Kōkiri Rising is that work, turned outward: bringing reciprocity, collaboration and redistribution back into the systems that keep people sick.
I don't have the answers. I don't think any one of us does. But I believe that a room of women who see the pattern clearly, and who come in restored rather than depleted, can begin to find the missing pieces together.
— Kia
Inside the 90 minutes
Energy first, so the thinking that follows has somewhere to land.
Open the circle
Acknowledgement of Country, a welcome, and a check-in round: your name, where you serve, and one word for how you're arriving.
Energy work
Grounding, breath and body attunement, heart coherence, and tuning into the collective field — because most of us arrive already depleted by the fight.
Systems thinking
We name the system in focus and look beneath the surface: who holds power, who is left out, and where the body of the system is aching.
An anti-oppressive lens
Whose voices are centred and whose are missing? Where could reciprocity, collaboration, sustainability and redistribution enter?
Yarning circle
An open yarn, in pairs and as a group, to gather the missing puzzle pieces each of us carries from our own corner of the system.
Close with action
One insight and one small action each, a closing blessing, and an invitation to return next month.
Restored energy first — so the thinking that follows actually has somewhere to land.
How we look at a system
What we can see is only the tip.
Most change efforts stop at the events — the crisis, the headline, the burnout. Kōkiri Rising uses the iceberg model from systems thinking to look further down, to the patterns, structures and beliefs that keep producing the same outcomes.
Change at the surface brings relief. Change below it brings freedom.
Events
What's happening that we can see.
Patterns
What keeps happening, over and over.
Structures
The policies, power and resources holding the pattern in place.
Beliefs
The stories underneath, about who matters and what's possible.
Who this is for
For disrupters and liberators — not yet sure how, but no longer okay with the status quo.
Psychologists, social workers and doctors
Working inside hierarchies that were never built to truly serve the people passing through them.
Community workers and people in service
Tired, and quietly worn down by the very systems they swore an oath to.
Women in positions of power
Who know, from lived experience, what those same structures cost.
Ecologists and scientists
Whose research already points toward the change this space exists to imagine.
Activists and social-justice leaders
Looking for a collaborative room to think in, not just another cause to carry alone.
You don't need a title, a plan or the right words. You only need to have noticed the pattern, and to be done pretending you haven't.
A closed loop
Not another wellness offering. A small, living part of a movement.
Kōkiri Rising is donation-based by design — remuneration that's felt, not directed, so the way we gather matches what we're gathering to change. And what happens in the room doesn't disappear when the call ends.
Your voice is gathered
With your consent, the themes, gaps and ideas raised each month are recorded, never your name or your story.
Your gift funds the inquiry
Donations go toward research into systems and anti-oppressive theory: the thinking behind each gathering.
It comes back to the circle
What we learn returns to the group, so each gathering builds on the last and the picture grows clearer together.
The heart of it
“Nāu te rourou, nāku te rourou, ka ora ai te iwi”
with your food basket and my food basket, the people will thrive
No one of us holds the whole answer. Each of us carries a basket — what we've seen, what we know, what our corner of the system has taught us. Kōkiri Rising is where we bring them to the same table.
The details
Come and go as you need.
90 minutes, once a month
Drop in
No enrolment, no missed-session guilt.
By donation
Give what feels right.
Start date to be announced — the waitlist hears first.
Join the waitlist
Be part of the change you're not yet sure how to make.
The system won't shift because one of us carries more. It shifts when we stop carrying it alone.
Join the waitlist