Whānau ora is a multifaceted term in wide use that means many different things to many people. At its core is the concept of family well-being.
In 2009, the Government recognised that current approaches to service delivery were not serving Māori families well enough. It set up a taskforce to look at new ways of interacting with Māori providers of community-based services. After considering the taskforce's advice, the Government set up Whānau Ora.
Administratively, Whānau Ora is a set of three different initiatives (the Initiatives). They are largely funded through Vote Māori Affairs, and the government agencies most involved in providing support for those Initiatives are the Ministry of Māori Development (Te Puni Kōkiri), the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Social Development. People of any ethnicity could receive funding through Whānau Ora.
In this report, we set out to clarify for Parliament and the public what Whānau Ora is, where the funding has gone, and what Whānau Ora has achieved after four years. It was not easy. Whānau Ora was not consistently described, which makes it hard for us to describe it and hard for the agencies to link results to objectives. Some results have not been adequately reported on yet. It is too soon to tell what other aspects of Whānau Ora have achieved.