Community psychology has a long tradition of emphasising the importance of values in our work as practitioners and researchers. And yet, what it means to practice one’s values as an individual or a group, remains elusive. In this symposium we give three perspectives on values-based practice based on findings from a participatory action research project we ran in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand in 2019. The project took a bicultural approach with a Māori (Dan Hikuroa) and a Pākehā (Niki Harré) lead researcher. It involved a Rōpū Whai Whakaaro/Values-based Practice course that was held over five consecutive Monday evenings with 23 community participants. The course began with participants discussing their shared values after which they broke into small groups to further explore one value in depth. The research team took observational notes and had regular meetings to reflect and plan, and at the end of the course participants were interviewed on their experience and understanding of values-based practice.

Fernanda Munoz Duran will describe how participants understood values-based practice at different levels. At the personal level they primarily described interactions with others such as “calling out” language that violated what they saw as important values, and being “mindful” of their own practice. Notably, while participants could describe small groups that were values-based, most struggled to describe values-based organisations, and many talked of a contradiction between the formal values of an organisation and what happened in practice. At a national and international level, many participants described values-based practice as the response to tragic events, specifically Jacinda Ardern’s response to the mosque attacks that took place in Christchurch on March 15, 2019.

Brooke Murphy then discusses the way in which we, as researchers, attempted to be values-based and the participants’ experience of the rōpū/course. Thematic Analysis of the interviews indicated that the course provided psychological safety and perceived inclusion, which supported the participants to discuss, disclose, and participate in shared activities in ways that contributed to new understandings and practices. Niki Harré will finish by focusing on her growing understanding of “kaitiakitanga” which was one of the values discussed by a small group during the rōpū. Kaitiakitanga is a Māori approach to the natural environment that involves the interweaving of an origin myth, unbroken lines of natural and human ancestors and a set of expected practices.

In the second half of the symposium we will open a discussion with participants about the values they attempt to hold in their practice asking: 1) In what way is your work or research “values based”? 2) What supports you in being values-based? 3) What barriers do you experience to values-based practice? 4) How can we, and should we, as community psychologists, help people and organisations be values-based?

The symposium “works the boundaries” as the research project is based on a Māori / Pākehā partnership and we attempt to discuss what values-based practice looks like in complex real world settings. It is also focused on the role values-based practice can play in “creating inclusive cultures and healthy communities”.