New Zealanders are resilient and live in inclusive and supportive communities

 Partnering with others 

We funded support for people experiencing family violence and sexual violence

MSD continues to fund support for people experiencing family violence and sexual violence, contributing toward the Reduced Violent Crime Government Target. Our KPI results show that providers are delivering a service that victims are satisfied with.

These services deliver whānau-centred care, working collaboratively with other stakeholders in the sexual violence sector. One of these services, the Child Advocates Programme, was evaluated this year and has demonstrated improved outcomes for the mothers and their children who access this service.

Through E Tū Whānau, a programme dedicated to addressing the impact of violence within whānau, hapū and iwi, we partnered with communities to develop and produce new qualitative and quantitative tools to effectively measure and assess change. These resources will be used to inform best practice in family violence prevention, and build whānau and community resilience and capability. 

To ensure the services we fund are accessible to disabled people, we launched training for our service providers for victims and perpetrators of family violence and sexual violence and issued grants to 44 providers to make their services more accessible.

We redesigned the ‘Our Culture, Our Pride: No Excuse for Abuse’ ethnic family violence booklet and translated it into more languages to address community feedback to improve accessibility. The booklet is now available in 13 languages.

We also fund work on prevention, with a focus on collaborating with communities to ensure services work for them. This year, we funded a wide range of services and campaigns, including:

• Te Huringa ō Te Ao – Supporting Men’s Behaviour Change services – in which providers develop services that are responsive to their local communities and emphasise whānau voices to support men harming others to change
• Love Better campaign – focused on young people (16–24 years) and designed to foster safe, positive and equal relationships. The recent phase of the campaign, Love Creep, helps young people to recognise coercive control through real stories. The ‘Third Culture Kids’ social media campaign, with articles by ethnically diverse youth, was a success, with over 1.1 million engagements.

We invested in research and tools to support our work in this space, such as for the Prevention of Abuse of Older People, including a mixed-methods National Study and the development of screening and risk assessment tools.

Some of the work we fund also contributes toward the Reduced Child and Youth Offending Government Target, alongside the Reduced Violent Crime Government Target, such as administering the Resilience to Organised Crime in Communities (ROCC) Community Resilience and Whānau Support Fund. This work supported 75 community providers this year to deliver community-led responses to the harms and drivers of organised crime.

We support communities in many different ways

We continued to invest in the national and regional food distribution infrastructure that supports communities in acute and chronic food insecurity. In 2024/25, community food providers distributed 457,340 food parcels to people in need, and our regional food hubs distributed 8,633,804 kg of essential food supplies to vulnerable communities. Further investment has been made through Budget 2025, as well as continued funding for KickStart Breakfasts and KidsCan, which provide breakfasts in schools and distribute jackets to children to reduce cost of living pressures.

To support people to build their financial capability, we funded providers to connect more than 24,000 people with trained financial mentors this year. We also supported The Generator, which provides seed funding and mentoring to help people on low incomes kickstart their business ventures and improve their financial situations. This year, the 589 responses to the participant survey show that 94 percent of those who transitioned off a benefit now have a job or active business.

Pasefika Proud, funded by MSD, continues its commitment to keeping Pacific peoples safe, resilient and thriving, including through supporting the development and implementation of Pacific Community Plans which address their specific needs. This year, there was a focus on working with Tuvalu, Tokelau, Fiji and Kiribati communities to implement their plans.

To support seniors, MSD has helped with the upgrade of SuperGold cards, including developing both the functionality of the SuperGold website and a prototype information hub of essential resources and support on this website.

To support carers, this year we have been collaborating with government agencies and external stakeholders to develop a new Carers’ Strategy Action Plan. This will lay out short and long-term actions and commitments that contribute to the health and wellbeing, financial security, and recognition and appreciation of carers.

We continue to support young people to lead

The Ministry of Youth Development within MSD encourages and supports young people to develop and use knowledge, skills and experiences to participate confidently in their communities. This year, we supported 147 providers to deliver youth development and youth enterprise programmes and services to more than 69,000 young people aged 12–24 years.

We led the planning, co-ordination and delivery of Youth Parliament 2025 with the support of the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives. Youth Parliament is a unique youth development opportunity, which this year supported 143 young people from across Aotearoa New Zealand to experience the political process, learn about how government works, and represent their communities as Youth Members of Parliament or participate as Youth Press Gallery members.

One of our highlights this year included delivering the biennial rangatahi Peaceful Action Leadership Movement (PALM) Symposium 2025 through E Tū Whānau in June, with more than 80 participants from across the country. This focused on:

• empowering and connecting rangatahi from diverse communities
• supporting leadership development, and cross-cultural and regional networks
• providing opportunities and information to support future vocational pathways.

Providing services that disabled people need

We transitioned the DSS function into MSD

In response to an independent review in 2024 that assessed the financial sustainability of DSS, the Government prioritised immediate action to stabilise the disability support system. In September 2024, DSS transferred from Whaikaha – Ministry of Disabled People into MSD as a branded business unit and a taskforce was set up to deliver the review’s recommendations for DSS.

Since then, we have made good progress by stabilising the DSS system and delivering against the recommendations in the Independent Review of Disability Support Services. We have put in place new financial controls and monitoring of services, including implementing Needs Assessment and Service Coordination (NASC) and Enabling Good Lives (EGL) site budgets, and a performance management framework to monitor NASC performance. This has seen a significant improvement in the financial management of these sites.

We have also established a Review Panel for specific high-cost residential and community support packages to ensure they are handled consistently, and strengthened how we commission and manage DSS contracts to improve how our services are delivered.

There is more work to do

While we have made good progress there is a lot more to do, and our forward focus is now on strengthening the system through our policy work. This includes focusing on the overall design of the system to ensure it is fair, transparent and consistent, and ensuring that we work effectively across government agencies so disabled people get the range of services they are entitled to.

We have a proactive stakeholder engagement approach, and have worked closely with the sector and key stakeholders to understand what is working well and where improvements can be made. A highlight in 2025 was the level of engagement we received through our community consultation, with over 3,300 responses provided through workshops across the country, online surveys, emails and written submissions. Our ongoing community engagement is core to the DSS approach and ensures that we are able to respond to issues and opportunities effectively.

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