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What we do
Creating change that matters and will last
We work with our clients to build vibrant communities, develop strong teams, gain profound insights and make well-informed decisions. Each project is approached with a bespoke strategy, based on proven methods, guided by our core values.
See some of our recent work below:
Focus on Community Development
Building community in Victoria Quarter South
Community engagement, project and stakeholder management,
research, co-design, collaborative placemaking
In the inner-city neighbourhood of Victoria Quarter South, we’re exploring how to develop a thriving neighbourhood and spark belonging in a place where it can be hard to connect.
Nelson, Union and Cook Streets sit in one of the most densely populated parts of the city centre. The area is marked by visible homelessness and begging, harsh urban “heat island” conditions from all the hard surfaces, and streets that prioritise cars over people, and many residents feel disconnected. At the same time, the area is full of possibility and there is a wealth of creativity, many ideas and much energy from those who live, work and invest in the area.
Drawing on local and international practice, our approach is grounded in strengthening the fabric of everyday life through participation. Our role is to connect and join in, offer more than we ask, help resolve concerns and add value, helping the neighbourhood feel safer, more vibrant and connected.
Kororāreka
Community engagement, workshopping and placemaking
Working with local people and the Far North District Council, Catalyse was invited to the Kororāreka community to support local placemaking in the waterfront area. We helped organise and run a pop-up shop to gather ‘big ideas’ to improve an iconic and well-loved place. Over 1300 ideas were collected! These ideas were refined in a weekend activation that began to develop a cohesive plan. We used our community heart pulse resource to find out more about those who participated in the weekend and painted a fabulous footpath game for people to have an example of a playful ‘small change’ activation to enjoy until it washes away.
Focus on Storytelling
Storytelling and values:
achieving impact in a noisy world
Development and delivery of innovative workshop series and resources, website development, growing community of practice ent organising and delivery
In partnership with ANCAD, Community Waitākere and Auckland Council, Catalyse developed and delivered an innovative new workshop series on values-based communication. Across two workshops we mapped audiences, clarified values, and tested storytelling frameworks that draw on globally recognised values research alongside Māori and Pasifika worldviews. In an era of attention scarcity, advocacy fatigue and shrinking funding, we’ve seen that facts inform, but stories connect – and when stories resonate with people’s values, joined-up pathways forward emerge and actions are taken. The next stage of this kaupapa is the launch of a Storytelling for Impact & Influence website in 2026. This online resource will bring together the tools we designed, tested and shared in 2025, recorded presentations, and exemplar stories from organisations.
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Focus on Climate Adaptation
Many communities, many paths
Community-driven flood recovery planning
The extreme weather events of early 2023 had an adverse effect on many communities across Tāmaki Makaurau, leaving people with damaged homes, disrupted routines, and uncertain futures. Within months, Auckland Council and the Crown committed more than $2 billion to storm recovery and resilience works, including the buy‑out of high‑risk Category 3 homes and major “Making Space for Water” projects. Catalyse has had the privilege of supporting community‑led recovery in several of these places alongside Auckland Council’s Flood Recovery Office. Each community has its own story, pace, and pathway – and our role has been to help them organise, imagine, and act together.
Pukekohe
Planning with the awa
In Pukekohe, we supported conversations that placed the awa at the centre – ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au – exploring how people and water can coexist in ways that honour past, present and future. Through workshops and hui, residents considered how flood recovery could also be an opportunity to heal relationships with local waterways and design for long‑term resilience, informing how upcoming resilience funding is understood and used locally.
Epsom
Turning over a new leaf
In Epsom, we’ve used creativity to help residents process grief and possibility following significant flooding impacts where numerous homes have been deemed unliveable. Through workshops with local schools, community groups and at local events, locals have created 221 hand‑painted “wish leaves”. These will form a beautiful and interactive kinetic mural on a highly visible site where homes are being removed due to flood risk into the future. This is a temporary public artwork that reflects what people love about Epsom and their hopes for the future, while also keeping conversations about land use, resilience and community commons visible in everyday life.
Eden
Reimagining a neighbourhood of change
In Eden, the removal of many homes due to unacceptable flood risk have reshaped the local landscape and raised big questions about future land use, commons and connection. Our work has brought residents together at neighbourhood scale to reimagine how these spaces could support flood resilience, everyday community life, and new forms of shared commons. Ideas were generated and demonstrated in a vibrant pop up gathering on one site, and collated to inform how locals, Council and partners invest in these transformed places.
We also develop custom tools for our projects!
Our tools and resources are an essential part of Catalyse work process. Standing on the shoulders of many, we often design and adapt tools for specific projects, so we get what is needed in the most appropriate way.
Kainga Ora Impact Stories
Research, assessment and tool development
Two of our tools were developed when Catalyse was commissioned by Powerdigm to collaborate with Kainga Ora to gather stories about the impacts of two community hubs. Together, these tools helped people who shared a community space (but didn’t always know one another) get to know one another better, stimulate conversation, prompt all sorts of reflections and questions as well as help facilitate an initial analysis on how well the hubs had worked.
This process means those contributing data also have a chance to contribute to making meaning of that data and the visual tools we've created make the gathering and analytical processes easier and accessible.
We have successfully adapted both of these tools for other contexts and purposes since and they continue to reveal all kinds of things!
Focus on Project Management
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Youthline Leadership Connect
Project management, co-design, facilitation
Catalyse project managed the development of a pilot well-being program for youth with Youthline. Using co-design and peer review processes, we customised our adaptive planning tool and created supporting resources to enhance students' leadership skills and understanding of well-being. This approach and the resulting project empowered rangatahi in five Tāmaki Makaurau schools to participate in leadership, mental health, and strength-building opportunities and the results have informed the implementation of the program in schools around the motu.
The Kūmara Awards
Project management, event delivery
The Kūmara Awards showcases and celebrates fabulous placemaking in several locations across Aotearoa. Co-created with Placemaking Aotearoa, the awards have been designed and run by Catalyse since 2020. We have developed processes for nominating, judging and celebrating placemaking projects - and the remarkable individuals and communities who make them happen - that infuse our public spaces with life. Each year, more projects are nominated and we are delighted to hear that the Kūmara Awards encourage even more people to actively contribute to the places where they live, work, and play.
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Darwin Conference
IACD International Association for Community Development
Project management and conference organisation
Catalyse helped plan and deliver the IACD World Community Development Conference ‘From the Edge’ 2023 in Darwin. With a focus on indigenous peoples and knowledge, we were an active participant in the planning committee: drafting communications materials, guiding principles, sponsorship documents and designing the logo. We also facilitated the inclusion of two indigenous keynote speakers from Aotearoa, convened a series of conversations to help resource Kiwis to get to the conference, moderated sessions and delivered two events at the conference (Story Slam and Geolingo). For three days, over 650 people from all over the world shared experiences and knowledge in traditional conference events as well as yarning circles, collective art and storytelling. Many connections were made and continue to grow!
Focus on Research and Strategy
Harae Mai and Welcome
Evaluation, project support and playbook development
Catalyse joined this community initiative to welcome new residents after it had already been prototyped in Glen Eden. The project provides resources to help those new to the area ‘find their feet’ in their new neighbourhood. The resources are decided on by a group of locals and gathered or created locally. We worked with Innovation Unit, Kāinga Ora and Roskill Together to support Haere Mai and Welcome in Roskill by collating and analysing information from workshops as it emerged and feeding it into the design process. We also designed some easy-to-use evaluation tools and undertook a range of interviews to assess the process. Along with information already gathered in Glen Eden, this information was used to create a playbook for other communities to use, should they wish to develop Haere Mai and Welcome in their place. This playbook is now being used in Oranga and we are working alongside those delivering it there too.
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Community Strategic Plans
Strategic planning and community engagement
At the request of Timaru District Council, Catalyse worked with the Community Boards in Geraldine and Pleasant Point to deliver strategic plans and first-year work plans. The work used a range of creative community engagement tools, including our ideas board, online and postcard surveys, and happened in places as varied as local pubs, cafes, markets, theatres, libraries, rural halls and schools. The strategies and plans were both grounded in and refined by conversations with Mana Whenua, community leaders, and the public including primary and secondary school pupils. It was a real pleasure to bring this work to the places people already gather in and help surface ideas from locals who do not usually engage in such work.
St John's Feasibility Study
Research and reporting
St. John's Presbyterian Church in Mt. Roskill hired Catalyse to conduct a feasibility study for a new community centre on their current site. We used postcard surveying in libraries, community centres and outside shopping centres to engage a wide range of locals and encourage them to tell us more in a longer online survey. This information was complemented by desktop research, statistics and mapping to provide a comprehensive report that documented not only what people would like but showing how feasible and viable such a facility is likely to be too.
Focus on Placemaking
International placemaking in action
Placemaking educational series.
Catalyse was delighted to partner with Auckland Council, The Urban Room Foundation, and the University of Auckland Faculty of Engineering and Design to deliver an innovative placemaking educational series in November 2025.
The free, three-part series was designed to provide hands-on learning and insights from international and local experts. It helped participants update their placemaking skills and understandings, with a view to contributing to stronger, more connected, and sustainable communities here in Tāmaki Makaurau. As a relatively new Placemaker it was so nice to get others’ practical advice around the spaces and places I’m in where people and connection are the agenda . Thank you.
Malia, Auckland Council Placemaker
Hibiscus Coast Placemaking
Placemaking through play.
When the Hibiscus and Bays Local Board decided to invest in encouraging more play in their rohe, they were not thinking of dedicated playgrounds but of opportunities for play in all kinds of places. Catalyse was asked to work with local communities to help locals develop playful activities that mattered to them, cultivating community connections along the way. With 10 projects to deliver across the area in a 9 month period, we partnered with a wide range of local groups and organisations to deliver playful placemaking as diverse as a cupboard of games designed by adolescents for adolescents, a series of footpath games with an accompanying guide book and GeoLingo - a way of sharing language and feeling more at home in a place.
Mairangi Bay Placemaking
Locally-led placemaking facilitation and support.
Building on previous efforts led by Auckland Council and the Hibiscus and Bays Local Board, our role in this initiative was to support local residents to co-create meaningful placemaking. First, we facilitated a collaborative mid-winter/Matariki co-design workshop with community members. This session revealed a diverse array of placemaking ideas and identified three priority projects. Using a divergence-emergence-convergence framework to guide us in our role as enabler, these ideas were all integrated into a cohesive map, collaboratively developed and designed with input from the community.
Takapuna Pavement Placemaking
Community-driven placemaking facilitation and support
When local people expressed distaste for blocks of colour painted temporarily on footpaths in Takapuna, we asked them what they would like instead and, using chalk, they told us! With the support of Eke Panuku, people young and old, from all kinds of backgrounds and with many different experiences of ‘art’ shared ideas in a pavement art workshop that were then developed by a smaller group of locals with the help of two professional artists, Kingi Gilbert and Paris Kirby. With Catalyse’s facilitation and support, the group engaged with Ngāti Pāoa as Mana Whenua, navigated rules and regulations, and sourced materials to co-design several art pieces. One of these artworks, referencing key local features and stories, was installed for 8 months and will inform permanent works in the future.
