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Our Mission

We believe health and safety systems only stack the odds in the workers favour, and that ultimately, it’s the workers decisions and resulting behaviours.

Our mission to introduce a new genre of culturally intelligent health and safety practices that can be used to better position workers to make good health and safety decisions. Every business wants their workers to make good health and safety decisions either individually or as part of a team.     

Why IndigeSafe

Indigenous peoples number more than 370 million and represent approximately 5,000 different communities in more than 70 countries.  They are some of the most vulnerable workers in the World.  Their employment conditions are often precarious involving hazardous work. Indigenous workers continue to be perceived as problems to be fixed using culturally indifferent practices that research data shows are not working.

Despite this, many indigenous cultures also contain positive traditions and narratives about how risks can be perceived and controlled. By reprising this knowledge and contemporizing it as modern practices, businesses and workers are better placed to create sustainable, healthier, and safer workplaces.

For Māori Kia Tūpato is one practice that uses Mātauranga Māori (knowledge) and Tikanga Māori (customary practices or behavior) to enable workers to perceive risks more practically and utilizes a business’s health and safety systems more effectively.   

I love to work with and learn from Vance! He is someone who is amazing at engaging with workers and really understanding the risks from their points of view. He works diligently to understand the critical risks of a business and ensure they are managed for those on the frontline. He has over time built a suite of tools to improve worker wellbeing by connecting Maori culture with environmental health and safety systems and practice.

Gareth Beck. 2020 Emerging Practitioner of the Year

For any business wanting to enhance connection with their Maori workforce, Vance's work on improving worker wellbeing by connecting Māori culture, with environmental, health, and safety systems and practice is extremely valuable. At Site Safe we are working with Vance and others to ensure that we achieve the best possible training and engagement outcomes for Maori workers by focusing on the importance of culture in learning, and in turn creating leaders in the H&S space. Vance's approach is both realistic and based strongly on applied research, working with Maori workers on the front line of our high risk industries.

Brett Murray. Chief Executive at Site Safe New Zealand Inc

Vance is an outstanding contributor to the academic body of knowledge and the use of practical applications of Māori Tikanga into a workplace health and safety context. He uses curiosity to better understand how Māori workers use cultural norms to think about doing good work safely and has the mana to guide organisations to better understand how to integrate these concepts into their organisations.

Greg Dearsly. President at International Network of Safety and Health Professional Organisations

Vance has a significant track record in this area. Kia ora mo tenei mahi rangatira!

Kathie Irwin MNZM, PHD, MInstD

Vance has a real focus on worker health and safety by connecting traditional health and safety systems to Te Ao Maori concepts and helping bridge the gap.

Carey Griffiths. Manager Regulatory Practice at WorkSafe New Zealand

Vance improves worker wellbeing by connecting Māori culture, with environmental, health, and safety systems and practice.

Robyn Bennett. President, New Zealand Institute of Safety Management