Tara Moala MNZM

2022 Cohort

Pronouns: she/her

Tara is working alongside community to shift and create systems within a government entity to enable opportunities for her community and iwi to grow and thrive in their own autonomy.

Tara is Tainui in Aotearoa NZ with Chinese, Irish, Croatian and Lebanese heritage. She is based in Auckland (Tāmaki-makau-rau) where she is the Managing Director of her Social Enterprise, Rākau Tautoko, and General Manager Outcomes at Tāmaki Regeneration. She found her passion when she began working as a youth worker in South Auckland, continuing as a Social Worker and then Community Development Practitioner. She has a Bachelor of Arts and a Masters of Social Work Applied (1st Class Honors).

Her home is in Central-East Auckland in Glen Innes, where she lives with her Niuean-Tongan Partner and three tamariki (children). In 2016 she founded Rākau Tautoko, one of the first limited liability companies with charitable status, carving out a new way for social enterprise. Rākau Tautoko currently supports Community Development Practitioners working with communities to build their empowerment and engagement.

Tara's work at the Tāmaki Regeneration Company (TRC) as GM of Outcomes, includes enabling regeneration through Mana Motuhake (Indigenous Self-Determination) and in Rākau Tautoko shifting systems to enable people to thrive and grow their own communities. She envisages her community having the opportunity to create their own regenerative practices, drawing on indigenous practices.

“I am passionate about enabling community to become leaders in their own growth and development, holding true to their own Mana Motuhake (sovereignty).”

Social change work

Tara is working with her Tāmaki community to create their own regenerative practices. She will use Indigenous and community specific ways of working to create a new way forward that will empower local community leaders and members to activate community-led regeneration with embedded indigenous practices. This will mean exploring what Indigenous-driven, transformational change looks like. How tikanga (practices and values) could help to shift current community practices. How Mātauranga Māori (knowledge and ways of being) can enable her community to lead and apply culturally grounded, place-based, community-led regeneration.