Reflections for 2025
REAP Aotearoa Annual Review
Reflections for 2025
E ngā mana, e ngā reo, e ngā karangatanga maha o Taiako Taiwhenua ki Aotearoa, tēnei te tuku mihi maioha ki a koutou katoa i tenei wāhanga whakamutunga o tau!
Greetings to you all!
We have been in the role of co-chairs and independent members Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti, for just over 15 months. It’s been a steep learning curve and no doubt we will continue to build deeper insights and learnings about the REAP movement and collective going forward.
Our time on the board so far tells us that as a movement, we are quite dynamic and diverse. As a collective we are very well organised and well established. We would like to thank all the REAP Aotearoa board members for contributing your time to building and strengthening the collective.
Looking Back
As we close out the 2025 year and reflect back on the last five years, our rural communities have had to change and adapt to a multitude of rapid political and public service interventions. The impacts of this have ripple effects that span far and wide across social and economic; cultural; political; education and environment spheres and systems.
Looking Forward
We will continue to strengthen our collective ability to adapt positively to political changes on the horizon. The known and unknown impacts and ripple effects will continue to resonate throughout our rural communities, our townships, all families, whānau, hapu and Marae.
Our Tiriti o Waitangi framework helps remind us that every human, family and whānau living in a rural community has a right to quality, life long learning and education – from pepi to pakeke or twinkle to wrinkle. Access to quality information, knowledge, learning and education are fundamentals for growing flourishing communities and local economies.
Our Focus for 2026
Our focus for 2026 is to support the organisation to embed our Tiriti Framework fundamentals where strong governance practice exists to protect the collective. With an election year upon us, we look forward to coming together at the national conference in Wellington. We also hope to connect and meet with as many of our governance volunteers throughout the year.
We wish everyone a safe and happy summer break.
Ngā mihi mahana ki a koutou, ki a tatou katoa!
Erina Hurihanganui and Erin Simpson
Co-Chairs, REAP Aotearoa
Reflections for 2025
We welcomed two new CEOs to the REAP whānau – Rik Soderlund, West REAP, whose first two weeks on the job included co-hosting the annual REAP Conference (and what a great conference it was!), and Peter Kemp, who joined the team at Central Plateau REAP.
Core Contract
We have seen a lot of change driven by evolving government priorities, especially in the Education sector.
Early Childhood and Schools
Our contract with the Ministry of Education expired on 30 June, and we were able to negotiate a new contract which was eventually signed off by the Minister of Education at the end of August. The new contract reflects very clearly the government’s priorities for education – increasing attendance and participation, and improving educational progress and achievement. The contract also refocuses our work to ensure our activities and support in our communities are clearly aligned with the priorities.
Along with the refocus, the way we report to the Ministry has also fundamentally changed, and REAPs are working hard to adapt accordingly. Our first reports under the new regime are due to the Ministry on 13 February 2026. These reports are vital to ensuring our ongoing role in the early childhood and schools sectors. We are confident that REAPs will rise to the occasion – the foundation work we have been doing over the last couple of years has positioned us to pivot and respond to these changes from the Ministry. Preliminary results to the end of the year indicate that we have delivered just over 900 programmes/activities to the early childhood and school sectors, 31,000 children/students, 4,000 educators and 7,000 whānau have participated in a REAP initiative. Once again the collective has worked hard to ensure our early childhood and schools communities have access to the learning and skill development they need!
Delivered to early childhood and school sectors
Participated in REAP initiatives
Engaged with our programmes
Supported through our work
Adult and Community Education
In the earlier part of the year we noticed the level of engagement with our ACE programmes was tracking behind previous years. This was noted by the Tertiary Education Commission who raised concerns about our ability to achieve our contracted target. REAPs responded and worked hard to ensure that we would achieve our targets for the year.
As a result, our September report showed that activity had picked up and we were on track to achieve as expected. Preliminary results to the end of the year indicate that, once again, we will substantially exceed our targets!
ACE initiatives across communities
Supported in their learning journey
Completed by participants
As of writing this newsletter, we have delivered 1200 programmes, supported 11,000 adult learners who have collectively completed 104,000 hours of learning! Another great effort from the collective to ensure our communities have access to the learning and skill development they need to be successful in their lives!
Outcomes and Impact
Over the last couple of years, we have been working on building our capability to understand the outcomes we are seeking through our work and the impact that work has in our communities. REAPs have been building their understanding about their impact, and we are now able to incorporate this information into our reporting – to funders, to stakeholders.
The recent changes to our Ministry of Education contract have put this into sharp relief. We now need to specifically report on the outcomes we are achieving and the impact we are having. The work we did a couple of years ago with Synergia to develop an outcomes framework is now paying off – we are able to frame our work through the lens of barrier removal, outcomes, and impact, rather than inputs and outputs.
Communications
Over the year we have worked hard to maintain a presence with decision makers, MPs in particular. We have met with a number of different MPs of all stripes, talking about the work of REAPs and the value we add in our rural communities. In particular we met with the National Ag Caucus and the Labour Rural Caucus.
Both were productive meetings where there was genuine interest in our work and ongoing support for what we do. We are confident that there are more MPs than ever who now know about REAP. Thank you for all your hard work this year, and make sure to enjoy your break with whānau. Here’s to a great 2026! Ngā mihi, Tracey