Katrina Smit
2021 Cohort
Katrina is centering joy, abundance and whanaungatanga, being relationally connected, as the foundation for Mana Motuhake, Māori sovereignty and agency.
Katrina works in the Family Violence team at the Ministry of Social Development (MSD). She works to improve the way the government funds support for people seeking help to heal from the impacts of family violence.
Katrina is focused on how people access what they need and want - as opposed to what service providers think they need and what the government wants them to have - and what Māori are capable of creating through whanaungatanga, manaakitanga (care and generosity) and aroha (love), that does not depend on state permission, giving and government funding.
Katrina centres joy, love, beauty and abundance in her life and believes people's creative capacities are key to their sense of individual and collective self determination. Based in Wellington, Aotearoa, she has a professional background in marketing and communications, relationship management and service design; working across the arts and the public sector. She is interested in the structural conditions needed to support communities to thrive and believes Indigenous ways of knowing and doing hold the blueprint for how to do this. Her work as a public servant is motivated by a belief that the system can be reimagined to create equitable outcomes if people are bold and brave enough to test and discard mechanisms that don’t serve them or act as barriers to what they want to achieve. More importantly, she believes people can’t wait for the government to deliver the equitable outcomes they want to see because those changes will be too slow. Her primary interest is what people are capable of doing themselves through the quality of the relationships they have and the love they have for one another, and by shifting the conversation away from what’s wrong to what matters.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Art History and English) from Victoria University (Wellington) and a Master of Arts (Art History) from the University of Auckland.
Social change work
Katrina's social change project started by investigating the potential of whanaungatanga – the Māori system of being relationally connected. She is keen to further explore how whanaungatanga, manaakitanga and aroha encourage a sense of mana motuhake (self determination) and abundance.
Katrina's project asks the questions: How can Māori turn the tide on systemic barriers designed to separate, so that collectively they might activate what is already inherent to them? And what are the systemic barriers, like how their time is structured and spent, that limit the ability of Māori to live in connected and relational ways? What happens when Māori collectively as individuals, whānau, communities, hapū, iwi imagine themselves capable of creating the future they want? Tangible examples like Te Kohanga Reo movement show this is possible.
Her project is focused on how Māori create the change they want to see while highlighting the systemic barriers that serve to suppress them.