About
A prevention organisation, built to be examined.
Solid Hearts exists to provide education, advocacy, community support, and pathways to trusted support services for people affected by emotional, physical, domestic, family, and sexual abuse — helping build safer communities across Aotearoa New Zealand.
What we stand on
A safe and supportive space where people are heard without judgement.
Five values, each written as a commitment we can be held to rather than an adjective we would like applied to us.
Manaakitanga
We hold people carefully
Everyone who comes to us is heard without judgement. That is not a soft commitment — it shapes how we train facilitators, how we handle disclosure, and what we will not do for a funder.
Pono
We tell the truth about our results
We publish what did not work. We state the limits of what we can attribute to our own programmes. An organisation that only reports successes is not measuring anything.
Rangatiratanga
Communities lead their own change
We bring method and evidence. Communities hold the mana and make the decisions. Every partnership is designed so that we can leave.
Kaitiakitanga
Safety is a system, not a promise
Vetting, supervision, two-adult rules, disclosure pathways, incident review. Safeguarding is infrastructure, and infrastructure gets audited.
Whanaungatanga
Prevention only works as a network
We do not duplicate services that already exist. We strengthen them, connect to them and refer into them — warmly, never as a cold handoff.
Governance & transparency
We are a small, mostly volunteer-run charitable trust. Here is how we are actually governed today, and what we commit to publish so that can be checked.
How we are governed
Legal structure
Solid Hearts operates as a registered charitable trust in Aotearoa New Zealand, governed by a trust deed that sets out our charitable purposes and how the trust may act.
Current governance stage
We do not yet have a formal, independent board. Day-to-day decisions sit with our Founder & Lead Facilitator, checked by a small group of advisory volunteers with relevant expertise — finance, evaluation, te ao Māori, child protection and law. We are working toward a formal board as the organisation grows, and we say so rather than presenting a governance structure we do not yet have.
Safeguarding accountability
Our Safeguarding Lead owns child-protection practice, vetting, supervision and incident response, with an external escalation pathway to Oranga Tamariki or Police for anything beyond our own capacity to handle.
What we commit to publish
Registered and checkable
We are registered with Charities Services and listed on the Charities Register, where our annual returns are publicly available.
Annual report, published in full
Financial summary, programme results and independent review status are published each year, including findings that are not flattering.
Independent evaluation
Outcome evaluation is commissioned externally rather than assessed by us — we do not mark our own homework.
Privacy and data governance
How we collect, use and protect personal and community data — including Māori data sovereignty commitments — is set out on our Privacy page.
Verify our registration directly on the Charities Register(opens in a new tab) — registration CC61723.