Lucy Hone with her daughter, Abi, who was killed in a car crash at the age of 12.
With a challenging year ahead, we pay tribute to some of the Kiwis who have stepped up with their own stories to support others, becoming champions for lasting change. Joanna Wane asks nine “accidental advocates” whether the personal cost has been worth it and what the New Year holds.
For the past decade, Lucy Hone has been reliving the death of her 12-year-old daughter Abi over and over again, helping others to find a way through their own unbearable loss.
Exposing her private grief in such a public way wasn’t something she planned.
But when Abi was killed in a car crash in 2014, Hone and her husband, Trevor, were told their marriage, their family and their mental health were unlikely to survive it. Instead, she says Abi’s death taught her that it’s possible to live and grieve at the same time.
Now a global leader in the field of resilience psychology and co-founder of the Coping with Loss online support programme, Hone says sharing her experience to help others keeps Abi’s memory alive and makes her daughter’s short life feel that it has a legacy.
“I wouldn’t be doing any of this if little Abi Hone hadn’t lived –and died – so I like to think we’re doing it together. She’s sort of doing it with me.”
In March, the Christchurch-based author of Resilient Grieving heads to Vancouver to present a follow-up to her 2020 TED talk, viewed more than nine million times.
Hone is also writing another book and has been running sessions with global corporates to better support people in the workplace who are experiencing distress in their personal lives.
“It’s been a wild and devastating 10 years,” she says, “but I have honestly come to see that, if you let it, grief can be a portal to what really matters in life”.
Poverty is an issue that will never truly be “solved”, acknowledges Kindness Collective founder Sarah Page. In 2024, some long-standing charities shut their doors, while government and philanthropic support reduced dramatically.
“Meanwhile, the number of people turning to charities like ours grew by 52%,” she says.
“It was a tough year and it felt like there was an overwhelming surge in demand for services that could never quite keep up.”
Ten years ago, Page suffered from postnatal depression after the birth of her son.
To focus on gratitude and the needs of those around her, she and her husband began rallying friends and family to empty cans from their cupboard and donate them to the local women’s refuge.
Today, the Kindness Collective runs multiple nationwide programmes, from donating kids’ pyjamas to providing day-to-day essentials for families in hardship.
In 2025, Page hopes the challenge of confronting poverty will be given the priority it deserves.
“It’s easy to get bogged down by the seeming futility of it all,” she says.
“The never-ending cycle of need. The critics. The inevitable judgment that comes when you share your personal struggles, especially around mental health and being plain exhausted by it all.
“But there is power in sharing our stories. In opening ourselves up, we make connections, create understanding, and, most importantly, make a difference in someone else’s life.
“Sometimes, it’s the hardest, most vulnerable moments that lead to the deepest, most meaningful connections.”
Last October, Malcolm Mulholland welcomed his second grandchild. She’s been named Wiki, in a bittersweet tribute to Mulholland’s late wife, who died of breast cancer in 2021.
“I tend to think at some level, she’s watching over all of us,” he says, reflecting on a year that saw the Government initially renege on its pledge to fund new cancer drugs in the Budget – a position that was swiftly reversed due to the public outcry.
After his own shock diagnosis of prostate cancer, Mulholland is now cancer-free.
However, he has continued the campaign he began alongside Wiki to lobby for better drug funding in New Zealand, which falls well below the OECD average.
In 2025, he’d like to see reforms to Pharmac that would make the agency not only more transparent but quicker to assess and subsidise new medications and therapies.
A research development adviser at Massey University in Palmerston North, Mulholland admits the conversations he has with families as a patient advocate when a loved one is dying can be traumatic, triggering his own painful memories.
“But for me, it was really important that the work I did with Wiki wasn’t just left in the dust,” he says.
“How can you say ‘I can’t help’ to somebody who wants to live? You can’t.
“It goes against my fabric as a human being. And I know it went against hers.
“So I’m proud of the gains that have been made, including since she passed. I think she’d be very proud of it. It’s a legacy for her as much as it is for me.”
In the weeks before Christmas, Sophia Malthus completed her law degree, moved house and began filming a second season of her TV show This is Wheel Life, with her cousin and carer, Indy Henman.
Entering the workforce as a disabled person is a daunting prospect for the 28-year-old, who suffered a spinal injury that left her paralysed from the neck down when she was thrown from a horse in 2016 while training as an apprentice jockey.
Unable to use her hands, she learnt how to type with what little movement she still has – punching out university assignments with her pinky knuckles.
This is Wheel Life, available for streaming on TVNZ+, is a lens on living with a physical disability, Each episode focuses on a different aspect, from relationships to accessible fashion and fitness (“The Gym Bod of a Quad”).
The show’s second season will go to air later this year. More than 80% of people with spinal injuries are men, so part of the motivation for Malthus was giving visibility to disabled women, too.
“It’s a place for young people to learn about how to interact with their disabled peers but also for the older generation, who didn’t have as much access to disabled people,” she says. “We’re a lot more out in the community now.”
Despite opening up her life to such public scrutiny, Malthus is clear on where she draws the line.
“I’m more than happy to talk about catheters and all of the things to do with my disability, but when it comes to my own personal affairs, I keep them pretty private.”
It began in his Christchurch barbershop, where Matt Brown would share with customers his childhood story of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
Last year, She Is Not Your Rehab – the movement Brown went on to found with his wife, Sarah, to break the cycle of intergenerational violence – went global.
A men’s health app, innerBoy, was released in Australia; their first annual Love U Bro Day generated more than 18 million video views; and a trauma-informed resource series was developed for youth workers in the United Kingdom.
In mid-2025, the couple are launching their first children’s book, This is Not Yours to Carry, which they hope to gift to all children who find themselves in a refuge.
“As an introvert, I never set out to have a public platform,” says Brown.
“Talking the way I have about intimate partner violence, family harm, and sexual abuse was never easy, but I knew that role modelling vulnerability was the only way we could truly reach men beyond the shame.
“For me, the work is always worth it when I meet men in prison, community or online who break cycles of shame and violence, because I think of myself as a young person, hoping that someone would have helped my father heal and be better for us kids and our dear mother.”
As an advocate for survivors of sexual violence, Louise Nicholas has spent more than three decades sharing her own story to clear a path for those who have followed behind her.
Now, as a kaitakawaenga (mediator) with the Survivor Experiences Service for people who were abused in state or faith-based care, she’s come face to face with abusers who have also been victims themselves.
“What’s been amazing is talking to the men in prison,” she says. “It really helped me understand so much more about why people do what they do.
“You’re talking to a 60-year-old man who suffered horrific abuse at a young age and his pathway literally was set for him. It’s not condoning what he has done to end up in prison, but you can understand why he ended up there and it’s absolutely humbling.”
The independent Louise Nicholas Trust, which she founded in 2023, helps survivors navigate the justice system, turning trauma into a healing experience where survivors feel both safe and heard.
Looking to the year ahead, however, Nicholas is “gutted” at the removal of consent programmes in schools that have helped challenge what was once accepted as normal behaviour.
“I get asked, ‘If something bad happened to you today, would you go through all that again?’ Hell, yes, I would. Absolutely,” she says.
“In the beginning, not so much. I’ve gotta be honest about that.
“But by having the right support and the right people around you, going through the court process is hugely more rewarding than it was back in my day.
“And it’s not just about the survivor. It’s the support that’s needed for the whānau as well, because there was none for mine.
“So if I can get out there and make a difference to a whānau and to a survivor, I’ll keep doing that until I don’t need to do it anymore.”
At the age of 46, Wellington-based writer Sarah Connor was sent to a cardiologist with a suspected heart condition, referred to a counsellor for anxiety-induced panic attacks and prescribed antidepressants. She was actually in perimenopause.
Five years on, she’s become a speaker and menopause advocate, sharing her experience and resources in workplaces and communities all over New Zealand, from corporate businesses to non-profits and women’s groups.
“It’s not like there was a moment when I sat down and thought, ‘I love my job as a writer but I’d really like to be a speaker and advocate known by my local takeaway shop as the Menopause Lady’,” says Connor, who launched a grassroot project Menopause over Martinis, as a platform for women to talk openly (and often with humour) about a natural but sometimes challenging cycle of life.
In 2025, she’d like to see a publicly funded awareness campaign about menopause rolled out nationwide and for every GP and health professional to get up to speed with the latest research. She also believes every secondary student should learn about menopause at school, alongside puberty and pregnancy.
“This already happens in the United Kingdom,” she says.
“Everyone has the right to understand their changing mind and body at any stage of life, and everyone – not just some people – should be able to access affordable specialist menopause care if needed.”
“This is yours for what you have done,” Governor-General Dame Cindy Kiro told Sally Walker, as she presented her with the New Zealand Order of Merit last year.
Walker, who spearheaded a public petition that led to an official pause on mesh surgeries for urinary stress incontinence in New Zealand due to safety concerns, was momentarily taken aback.
“She said the New Zealand Local Hero of the Year award [from Kiwibank] was for my advocacy, but this one was for me. I’d never looked at it like that.”
Walker’s insides were so badly damaged by surgical mesh that she was forced to get her bladder removed and her vagina sewn closed. Still in pain today, she’s had a dozen operations over the past 15 years and was also hospitalised with sepsis.
Hundreds of other women have suffered irreversible complications from mesh implants that left them with severe or chronic pain. Walker has heard distressing stories from young women in their 20s through to the oldest, aged 91.
While she believes the procedure can still be an appropriate treatment in the right circumstances, she wants surgeons to be credentialled and bound by stringent conditions.
Revealing such deeply personal details about herself in the public domain hasn’t come easily to Walker, who considers herself a very private person, but she says the challenge to ensure women’s safety is paramount.
“I told my family that if I was going to do this, I’d have to share everything, and they supported me fully.
“When you’re harmed with mesh, you lose hope. When my story came out, I know that it gave women the courage to come forward. They put their trust in me to try and make a difference. That’s the best reward I could have.”
David Letele’s faith in humanity was restored – at least, to some degree – by the support that flooded in after a large freezer storing tonnes of meat in his South Auckland foodbank was deliberately turned off in the weeks before Christmas and a forklift vandalised.
The foodbank, which supplies up to 1000 families a week, was already facing closure due to rising costs. Within a few days of the targeted attack, more than $100,000 had been donated via a Givealittle page.
“That showed the community spirit is alive and well,” he says. “The power of the people is still there.”
In mid-December, financial support from two rich-listers, a church and the public gave the foodbank a last-minute reprieve.
The son of a notorious Mongrel Mob leader, Letele became a professional rugby league player but fell into depression and alcohol addiction after his supermarket business in Australia went bust.
By the time he came back to New Zealand, he weighed 210kg.
His fight back to fitness as a professional boxer – shared by Letele on social media – led in 2014 to the founding of Buttabean Motivation (BBM), which now operates two free gyms and a community kitchen in South Auckland alongside the foodbank, and a social supermarket in Tokoroa.
Letele, who’s launching a new He Hauora He Taonga- Health is Wealth programme for rangitahi at Waikato’s Spring Hill prison, is expecting an even tougher year ahead.
“With all these cuts happening across the board, it’s like there’s this avalanche of need that’s coming,” he says.
“And it’s gonna affect everybody, not just the people down at the bottom.
“So, my message is to stick together and help each other. If you can help, you should.
“That’s the way we live our lives. If we can help, we do it. And if we all lived our lives that way, this country would be a better place.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special interest in social issues and the arts.
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