E Tū Whānau is a Māori-based movement focusing on positive change through actions that champion and support whānau (families) to thrive in their home and communities. It has been actively promoted in former-refugee and migrant communities whose collective values, practices, traditions and resilience, along with other protective factors, resonate with Māori at a cultural and spiritual level. The Programme of Action for E Tū Whānau is facilitated through the Māori Community Partnerships group of the Ministry of Social Development.

E Tū Whānau promotes and upholds the Indigenous values of aroha (giving with no expectation of return), whanaungatanga (building connection), whakapapa (knowing who you are and where you belong), mana/manaaki (building the mana of others, through nurturing, growing and challenging), kōrero awhi (positive communication and actions) and tikanga (doing things the right way, according to our values). E Tū Whānau is a movement for positive change developed by Māori for Māori, but there is also a growing demand to deliver initiatives like E Tū Whānau in and to migrant communities, especially those of Colour.

Specifically, culture-centred initiatives such as E Tū Whānau are able to respond to challenges arising from migration processes and from specific events that have repeatedly tested the resilience of the people of Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter, Aotearoa), most recently during the Covid-19 pandemic as well as after the Ōtautahi Christchurch (hereafter, Ōtautahi) mosque shooting on Friday, 15 March 2019.

Broadly, the decision to leave one's country of birth and homeland is never an easy feat. Migration decisions are often underpinned by push and pull factors such as political instability, lifestyle choices, employment opportunities and educational prospects for their children. For former refugees, the escape from civil wars, human rights violations, religious persecution and displacement are push factors for risk-taking journeys to countries where United Nations protection is sought for resettlement to a safe country. My own whānau (family) had to make a hasty decision to leave Fiji, the country of our birth and homeland for three generations of ancestors who had arrived from Afghanistan, India, Guyana and the Solomon Islands. The execution of the first coup in Fiji in 1987 was the push factor for our whānau's decision to migrate to Aotearoa where strong Fijian diasporic social networks existed.