The Vā is Infrastructure: Our Role as The Backbone Behind Le Moana West Collective

Across West Auckland, hundreds of Pacific organisations, churches, community groups, practitioners and leaders are working every day to support the wellbeing of their communities. Many are responding to the same pressures, serving the same families and pursuing similar aspirations, but often within systems that encourage organisations to work separately.

Le Moana West Collective was established to create a different way of working. Today, its network connects more than 80 Pacific leaders and 200 Pacific groups, with a collective reach of more than 11,000 people. At its heart is a commitment to strengthening the vā between those already serving West Auckland’s Pacific communities and creating the conditions for them to work collectively.

The Collective emerged from an understanding that many of the systems surrounding community organisations can unintentionally encourage competition, fragmentation and silos. Rather than adding another organisation into an already active ecosystem, Le Moana creates a shared space where Pacific leaders can build trust, understand what is happening across the region, identify common priorities and explore where working together might create greater impact.

Yet bringing people together is only one part of collective work. Rich talanoa can identify opportunities, surface challenges and generate new ideas, but when everyone returns to the demands of their own organisations, there still needs to be capacity to carry those conversations forward.

This is the role we play. Tapasā – Navigating Futures holds the backbone function for Le Moana West Collective.

The Collective describes its way of working through the metaphor of the Kalia, a traditional voyaging vessel reflecting shared whakapapa across Te Moana Nui-a-Kiwa. Pacific communities are the crew, the network of Pacific leaders are the steerers, and Tapasā holds the role of navigator. No single organisation owns the Kalia; each part relies on the others for the journey to move.

For Tapasā, being the navigator means holding the infrastructure around the Collective that allows relationships and ideas to become action. The team reads system conditions, connects and aligns partners, follows priorities emerging through talanoa and helps translate collective knowledge into practical next steps.

Some of that work is strategic, but much of it is practical and often unseen.

Tapasā convenes relationships across the network, connects leaders and organisations, communicates what is happening across the Collective, writes reports and captures what communities are seeing and learning. It can fund-hold on behalf of collective initiatives, manage the accountability that comes with investment, and work alongside funders to create pathways for resources to reach Pacific groups and communities.

This means the responsibility for progressing collective priorities does not fall solely on community leaders who are already stretched delivering their own mahi. When an opportunity emerges from talanoa, there is capacity to follow it. When organisations could benefit from working together, there is someone connecting them. When funding becomes available, there is infrastructure capable of holding it, distributing it and reporting on what that investment has enabled.

Underneath all of this is something less tangible, but equally important: the vā.

The infrastructure between us

For Pacific communities, relationships are not separate from the work. They shape how the work happens.

A relationship can determine whether a small community organisation hears about an opportunity, whether a leader feels comfortable sharing what their community is really experiencing, whether organisations trust one another enough to collaborate, or whether a funder understands the context behind what they are being asked to invest in.

Those relationships take time to build. They grow through repeated talanoa, showing up in community, listening before asking, making connections and understanding the aspirations of organisations beyond the projects they are currently funded to deliver.

Tapasā describes this as relational infrastructure: the web of trust, knowledge, connection and reciprocity that allows a community ecosystem to mobilise when opportunities or challenges arise.

Unlike a building or programme, relational infrastructure can be difficult to point to. Its value becomes visible through what it enables. Two groups discover they are working towards the same outcome and begin collaborating. A funder gains access to community knowledge they may not have reached through a conventional consultation process. A grassroots group becomes part of an opportunity because somebody within the network understands the value of their work.

This is why the backbone role cannot be separated from tending the vā. Tapasā sits across relationships with community organisations, Pacific leaders, funders, institutions and partners, helping information and resources move between them while maintaining the trust required for those connections to work.

Tapasā's position also helps bridge the different worlds of community and funding. By holding relationships with both, the team can translate between institutional requirements and community realities. Fund-holding, reporting and accountability sit alongside the relational work of understanding where capability already exists, who is best placed to respond and what support might enable community organisations to participate.

The result is not simply a different way of distributing money. It is a stronger pathway between resources and the communities those resources are intended to serve.

Valuing what makes collective action possible

The experience of backboning Le Moana West Collective has reinforced a wider question for Tapasā about what funders and institutions choose to value.

It is relatively easy to see the cost of delivering a programme. There are facilitators, venues, resources, participant numbers and outputs that can be placed into a budget and measured at the end. The work that happens between programmes is harder to quantify.

There is no simple output for the years it takes to build trust between organisations, or the value of knowing who should be brought into a conversation. A report might capture that a partnership was formed, but rarely the dozens of conversations, introductions and moments of trust-building that made the partnership possible.

Yet without that relational infrastructure, collective approaches can easily become a series of meetings. People gather, share valuable knowledge and leave with good intentions, but there is limited capacity to hold the thread between one talanoa and the next.

A resourced backbone changes what is possible. There is capacity to tend the network while individual organisations continue their own mahi; to look across the system rather than only at one programme or contract; and to connect community knowledge, relationships, funding and action.

For funders seeking long-term impact alongside Pacific communities, this creates an opportunity to think differently about investment. Funding community wellbeing can mean investing in programmes and services, but it can also mean investing in the relationships, coordination, trust and backbone capacity that allow communities to organise around their own aspirations.

The Le Moana Kalia captures this simply: partnership is how we travel together, and investment is how we resource the journey.

For Tapasā, navigating that journey means continuing to hold the vā between the many people already doing the work, while ensuring the insights that emerge through collective talanoa have somewhere to go.

Because the strength of a collective is not only found in who can be brought around the table. It is found in the relationships between them, the infrastructure that holds those relationships, and what those people are able to do together once they leave the room.

See more here: www.lemoanawestcollective.org