History Origins
Kōtare: Hope and a place to stand
Kōtare began life as a grassroots community project in 1994. In the decades since then, we have developed and sustained our residential educational centre at Hōteo North and run hundreds of workshops aimed at supporting and inspiring people and organisations working for social change.
Overview of the Kōtare history
Kōtare emerged from a year-long movement-building project called ‘Building our own Future’ (1993-1994). A group of union and community organisers, Catholic social justice activists, adult educators and Pākehā treaty workers came together to establish a ‘school for social change’. Inspired by the desire to create an enduring organisation where skills and knowledge could be passed from one generation to the next, and by the examples of the Scandinavian folk schools and Highlander School in Tennessee, the vision of Kōtare was born.
Early trustees: Tim Howard, Claire-Louise McCurdy, Katherine Peet, Karen Davis, Bill Bradford, John Benseman, Josie Lander, Cybèle Locke, Noelene Landrigan, Sue Bradford, Quentin Jukes.
Land and buildings of our charitable trust
By 1996 we had formed a Charitable Trust. In 1997 Kōtare purchased three classrooms from the Manukau Technical Institute and relocated them to a hectare of rural land near Wellsford. Relationships with tangata whenua are integral to our being. We were welcomed to the land at Hōteo North at the time of our formal opening and blessing in 1999 by people from Ngāti Whātua o Kaipara and Te Uri o Hau, and we continue to value our relationships with whānau locally.
The education programmes at Kōtare
Kōtare’s education programme started formally with the employment of anti-mining activist and treaty educator Catherine Delahunty in 1999. Our first official workshop took place in Whaingaroa/Raglan in June that year, aimed at strengthening the work of local tangata whenua and tauiwi on sewage issues around the harbour. Since then we have run hundreds of workshops both at our educational centre and at other venues around the country. With the onset of the covid pandemic we have also begun experimenting with participatory online workshop programmes.