Meet the Yellow Brick Road Team

John is our calm and able chief navigator. He is a warm and competent leader with many years’ experience in the health sector, both in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Mainly working with tangata whaiora in the past, or people experiencing mental illness, he had a lightbulb moment when he realised the power of family and whānau when travelling towards wellbeing. In fact, John says New Zealand’s biggest mental health support workers are in fact families, and so we need to show them how to do that and support them on that pathway. He has enormous energy and enthusiasm and is committed to the goal of all New Zealanders to be able to access quality whānau wellbeing support wherever they are.

Jade has worked for Yellow Brick Road and formerly Supporting Families NZ for a total of seven years, in both support worker and management roles. Add to that another dozen or more years in the mental health sector, and here is someone who knows our organisation and wider sector very well. With lived experience and a young family to care for, she completely grasps families and their needs, and is committed to creating equitable and compassionate services and a building a kete of skills and tools for the whānau we support and also for our staff.

Felicity manages our finances with dedication and alacrity. Behind the numbers, she has a wonderful empathy for our kaupapa. She is a qualified nurse as well as an accountant, which is a great combination for us because she gets how the health system actually works. She somehow manages to juggle our funds to make sure as many whānau as possible benefit from our services.

Belinda is an experienced communications manager, having worked in government, crown entities and the private sector for, shall we just say, quite a long time. She is excited about telling our story and reaching out to families who need us and the potentially unlimited pool of awesome people in our communities and the business sector who can support us too. Working part-time, her biggest frustration is not being able to sing our song from every rooftop more often than she actually does.

Fiona is our Community Liaison Co-ordinator, but actually is our in-house expert/turn-to person on a great many things. She knows just who is who and what is what in the mental health sector. Fiona attends all sorts of meetings and is a member of a number of committees, where she calmly but assertively represents the interests of whānau. She also provides our Board of Directors secretariat, reports to Te Whatu Ora, Te aka Whai Ora and Ministry of Health on the issues our people face, as well as making sure we have systems in place to report such things. Phew, lucky we have Fiona.

 Max’s arrival at Yellow Brick Road is no surprise, when you look at the path he has followed since he arrived from Germany some twenty years ago. Working with and supporting others is something he has always done. Max has worked with special needs children and as a community support worker in the mental health and disability sector.  He is a qualified speech and language therapist, and has a Masters in Clinical Supervision, which led to a role as a supervising behaviour specialist. Not stopping there, he studied management and joined us at YBR to do more of what he loves best. Of course, that is quite apart from hanging with his husband and dog, reading, writing and spending time in the beautiful Marlborough Sounds.