Te Whāngai is a community-based socio-environmental trust that provides work and life skills and multi-agency advocacy in a workplace environment to those at risk in the community that the economy can’t employ. These vulnerable people upskill themselves and broker change in their whanau while providing an environmental legacy for future generations. Based on kaupapa Māori te whare tapa wha philosophy, Te Whāngai provides our welfare dependent people with the toolkit to move from dependency to sustainability developing business disciplines, workplace expectation, peer relationships, job readiness and life skills while immersed in an enterprise that they develop to create opportunity for others to follow them. Te Whāngai aims to create productive lives for those members of society who are marginalised or provided ineffective support through regulatory channels enabling them to become productive socially fulfilled members of society.