Tuihana Ohia (Ngāti Pūkenga, Ngai te Rangi, Te Arawa), Pua Moe Awa Phillips (Tainui, Tuwharetoa, Taranaki), Donna Phillips (Tainui, Tuwharetoa, Taranaki) and Tim Mehrtens are the passion and fuel behind the collective idea of an app to help organisations create a more people-driven and intentional approach to wellbeing.

The health-tech start-up was selected to participate in Kōkiri 2021, the national kaupapa Māori business accelerator programme run by Te Wānanga of Aotearoa from its business and innovation hub, Te Ahikōmako – Centre of Māori Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

Rāngai – The Wellbeing Collective – was created during Covid-19 as a space for wellbeing advisors and practitioners to meet, exchange information, and bounce ideas. “We needed a sounding board,” Pua said, “Within 16 months, the collective had grown to a network of over 300 organisations.”

Having worked in the unwell space for many years, Donna brought a new perspective to the team of wellbeing leaders.

“I developed a framework tool that identifies a person’s unwellness to lead to prosperity and wellness. What Pua has done is brought our two worlds together, the problem and the solution,” Donna said.

Feedback from hui with the Collective led the team to discover there is no one-stop tool that captures and tracks the state of wellbeing in an organisation. They also identified that many organisations were taking a ‘scattergun’ approach when beginning their wellbeing journey.

The technology and framework behind Rāngai’s app will provide a temperature check of the wellbeing status of an organisation, gather relative data the organisation can use to draw conclusions, and create tailored recommendations for a more deliberate, people-first approach to wellbeing.

But the Collective is not just looking at wellbeing in the workplace, Tuihana says, “If we want to be truly intentional in elevating this space of wellbeing to shift the dial on some of the awful statistics that Aotearoa has, we need to look at it from a much wider perspective.”

As part of the Kōkiri 12-week programme, the team were matched with Ture.co.nz co-founder, Eve Steenson (Ngāti Whātua, Waikato-Tainui), as their coach. Ture.co.nz was part of the Kōkiri 2020 cohort and Eve was able to share their ‘expensive’ lessons as a word of caution. “Through the help and support of Eve and [Kōkiri Programme Director] Aubrey, we’ve been able to take the lessons from Eve’s journey and take more of a conservative approach,” said Pua.

Tuihana Ohia (Ngāti Pūkenga, Ngai te Rangi, Te Arawa), Pua Moe Awa Phillips (Tainui, Tuwharetoa, Taranaki), Tim Mehrtens and Donna Phillips (Tainui, Tuwharetoa, Taranaki) are the founders behind Rāngai, The Wellbeing Collective.

The proven business acceleration processes used during the 12-week Kōkiri programme, have helped the team reflect on their start-up journey so far and get a clear pathway for future development and business sustainability.

Kōkiri also provided the opportunity for the team to come together with focused intent and effort. “We all live other lives, we all have other jobs. That coming together gave us an incredible opportunity to focus our mental effort. The growth that we have in those moments is just brilliant,” Tim said.

Rāngai’s short term goal is to get a prototype up and running. “We are taking a scaled approach, so we will be selecting small test groups to ensure that the prototype we are developing is going to work across the board,” Tim said.