Advisory Board

The Māori Trustee Advisory Board offers advice and guidance to the Senior Management Team. The members are:

Audit and Risk Committee

Provides insight and independent advice to ensure robust internal control systems and the management of risk across the organisation to improve its risk management and organisational performance. The members of the committee are Pat Waite (Chair), Kirsten Patterson and Tracey Hook.

Investment and Credit Committee

Monitors the investment portfolio to ensure the best return on the Common Fund and General Purposes Fund while maintaining an acceptable level of risk for the organisation. The independent members of this committee are Mark Tume (Chair) and Keith Sutton.

Staff

With our head office based in Wellington, we have a solid foundation of 114 staff based across six different offices throughout New Zealand, giving us reach across the different rohe. Our team includes but is not limited to specialists in relationship and trust management, law, property management, owner engagement, land development opportunities, and communications. All team members help us to deliver services to owners that support both our strategy and key compliance activities. These teams and others are supported in turn by a number of internally facing teams including information management, registry and owner services and finance. 

A great place to work

As at 31 March 2017, we had a team consisting of 92 permanent staff, as well as 22 staff on fixed term, casual or contractor agreements. Our staff numbers have increased by eight on last year as we continue to build capability in-house to help deliver on various external initiatives in addition to our core compliance obligations, including the kiwifruit and honey mahi.

Our Kōrero Mai staff survey was again run with a good level of engagement overall, which we continue to support by running workshops to give staff an opportunity to kōrero back to our senior management team about different matters relating to feedback gathered from the staff survey.

Once again, the incredible passion and drive our staff have for helping owners achieve their visions and aspirations, shone through. This is one of the things they love most about working here. In addition to this, the reason that our staff said they loved working for us was again he tangata, he tangata, he tangata – the people – both internally and externally.

During the past year, our staff have had access to a number of different training opportunities, either based around their mahi or allowing them to further develop their skills to help them look to the future. The organisation as a whole also took part in plain language training that was well received. We’re also happy to report the continuation of our internal recognition programme – Te Tohu Manahau, which sees us nominate and celebrate an individual and team who live and breathe our values and strategy in their mahi.

We have also reviewed our health and safety processes as an organisation, in light of the new legislation passed in 2015, and this year look to develop a cloud-based performance management framework, in addition to introducing core internal training about what it means to meet our obligations as a trustee.