She Is Not Your Rehab

I started the healing work with men in a garden shed in the hood of Christchurch, New Zealand when I first started my barbering journey a decade ago. It started with conversations about our trauma and pain that affected too many in my neighbourhood. But it quickly grew to becoming a global message that has already resonated with so many because now is time for a male led initiative to change the narrative about family harm and domestic violence. 

Men must take responsibility for our collective healing so that we can transform our pain instead of transmitting it onto our women and children. 

With the right support and funding I will grow this conversation even further and work hard to get the tools and insights I have developed from the work I have done this past decade in NZ into prisons and male dominated spaces all over the world. 

Currently I have a book about to be released in July 2021 with Penguin - I am developing/testing a facilitator's resource so that this work can be replicated anywhere. I am especially passionate about indigenous, minority and disenfranchised communities. We have our own solutions but need empowerment and resources to heal. 

I am a 35 year old, NZ born Samoan, an internationally acclaimed barber and hair artist, communicator, husband, and father known for ‘giving great cuts’ and ‘inspiring great men.’ I am also a survivor myself of family violence and childhood sexual abuse and I share my story with the men who frequent my barbershops, My Fathers Barbers, as a way to foster vulnerability, healing, and connection.

I have created and facilitated barbering programs inside three men’s and youth prisons and have worked alongside multiple government departments and agencies to increase awareness about the role of barbers in creating safe spaces that allow men to talk. I host regular men’s anti-violence support groups from my barbershop so that men have access to free therapy and support to heal. 

While barbering skills has given me opportunities of teaching and demonstrating all over the world, my true calling is to redefine societies view of masculinity and to help end the cycle of domestic violence affecting families all over the world. I live by the proverb; "The day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit" so everything I do is for the future of my children's children's children. 

She Is Not Your Rehab exists to create violence-free communities worldwide by finding innovative and empathetic ways of inviting and encouraging males who perpetrate violence onto women and children to heal themselves. We exist to change the narrative around domestic violence and the way communities can re-frame and discuss it. We exist to move this often hard conversation from one that is shame based to being solution orientated.

We don't believe the typical punitive approach is successful judging from statistics globally via the World Health Organisation (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women) especially for men who are the product of intergenerational trauma and colonisation.(https://blogs.griffith.edu.au/gci-insights/2020/02/25/indigenous-people-in-australia-and-nz-and-the-intergenerational-effects-of-incarceration/) 

With 1 in 3 (around 30%) of women worldwide being subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence we know we have so much work to do from MALE LED initiatives. Women shouldn't have to fight for their own safety - She Is Not Your Rehab is about men standing up and saying "My Childhood trauma may not have been my fault but my healing is my responsibility"

The successful work we are doing here in New Zealand with our own communities, can be replicated in other communities also which is what we aim to do with our book.

For too long our women have had to fight for their own rights of safety. 

They shouldn't have to. This movement is an invitation for men to heal led from a male in the hopes that we can disrupt generations of intergenerational trauma and create peaceful and violence free communities. 

Because this movement was birthed from witnessing my own beloved Mother be a victim to my Father's endless abuse of her throughout my childhood, it was imprinted into me from a young age that someone needed to help him heal whatever pain was in him that he would inflict on her and my siblings and I. He would go in and out of prison but nothing changed. The system was not designed to help him. 

In everything I do now, I see the man in front of me as my Father. So I remember that any service to him is in fact service to his partner and children who are desperately longing for him to heal. Because I remain focused on this I keep him humanised and come from a place of compassion versus judgement. 

I believe impact starts where I am with what I have. 

This can simply be a vulnerable conversation with a man who has no one else to talk to or who feels condemned by society. This then directly impacts his own family - if he feels heard and seen then he's in a better place to father his children. This is my greatest impact because I am gifting what my own Father was never given, so he was never able to heal or Father his children how we deserved.

When I was first a barber where violence, incarceration, drug addiction and gangs were normal in my neighbourhood, I focused myself on impacting those who would come to me by truly accompanying them in their often very traumatic lives. Shared pain is more manageable. 

That impact has since grown to owning barbershops, teaching other barbershops how to hold space like this, running programs inside prisons and hosting free men's therapy groups, working alongside government and other agencies, giving a TEDx talk and now writing a book. 

I'm impacting humanity by supporting Fathers of our next generation to heal. This is how we break cycles of intergenerational trauma and abuse.

Currently as a world renowned barber/teacher/hair artist I support/mentor/teach the barbering community all over New Zealand and Australia in a series of gatherings. This network of barbershops and selected salons is hundreds of barbers/stylists. I am passionate about engaging with and investing in this community of businesses because of the impact they have everyday in facilitating conversations with all walks of lives who make up our communities who all need hair cuts. These conversations have been proven in a government funded research evaluation to change lives. 

In my prison programs and free therapy groups I impact hundreds of men that voluntarily attend and regularly engage. Not only does the work impact these men directly but ultimately it impacts their families - partners/children and our wider community. 

My social media accounts collectively reach hundreds of thousands of people. I use these platforms to educate, inspire, challenge and break cycles of abuse with fresh insight. Some of our online campaigns have reached millions of people - Eg: Our "Dear Mr Rock" campaign. 

My goal with my audio book and book (released next month) is for the impact to be millions of people over the next year. 

Our number ONE goal in all that we do is to ultimately Create Violence Free Communities. Our children deserve this so we plant seeds that one day they and future generations will eat the fruit of. 

We plan to achieve this via:

1. Breaking cycles of intergenerational violence and abuse with trauma informed education, indigenous models of community care and practical tools that men can immediately implement in their lives.

2. Engaging men (and those who have traditionally been perpetrators of violence) into the conversation in a palatable way and down the path of effective solutions. 

3. Our work coming from a place of genuine empathy, compassion, generosity and understanding that hurt people will indeed hurt other people. In our experience the perpetrator was once the victim too. If we can help that victim to heal then we can help men transform their pain instead of transmitting it. This will have a generational effect. 

4. Impacting the way that systems and institutions have ineffectively been running for too long. We want to disrupt the whole system so that it serves our people and supports them into a life of healing and peace. 

The barriers that exist are limitations around our time and financial resources. We've made significant progress with very little but our big overall goal requires more funds, the right connections and staff to help scale this bigger to impact people globally. 

Our book and audio book is being released in July 2021 with Penguin Books. Our desire is to set up book clubs with this book in mens prisons all over the world. Right now in conjunction with a government department and a very experienced male therapist, we are creating a resource for facilitators to be able to host SHE IS NOT YOUR REHAB bookclubs from anywhere and have much needed hard conversations. 

Because we want the book to be accessible we have raised 100k across multiple funders to buy 9300 books at wholesale. These books can now be distributed for free for prison groups that sign up. This will cover NZ, but already we have requests from other countries all over the world so we have decided that once the book is released to have an on-going fundraiser with a book distributor that means people can purchase a book to donate directly. 

We need staff to help with this! 

This would immensely help us because I truly believe we have the tools, lived experience, insight, education, passion and story to completely revolutionise the domestic violence sector worldwide. 

The family harm statistics worldwide is the hidden pandemic that continues to increase year after year so we need to do something different urgently; THIS IS IT. 

After years of doing this work I feel it's time to expand globally so that more can benefit from our work and research. Nothing can grow in obscurity and while we have been effective so far, doing everything we have with our own limited resources and time I can only imagine what could happen if we had the right team, connections, resources and funds to amplify our vision. 

I have no doubts that we could change the world. I promised my Mother before she passed, that I would do all I could to create a legacy in her honour that she would be proud of. To me this looks like gifting the right insights to families everywhere living in violence that we never had growing up. 

I'm confident in my ability to do this but need more on the team to make this possible. 

The leadership team starts with myself and my wife and co-founder Sarah. 

Both of us are equals, of indigenous descent and see ourselves as community servants. Diversity, equity and inclusion are not buzz words for us but indeed actual ways we live, lead and serve. We see this movement/kaupapa as a table for many to sit at and we have a policy that no one is ever turned away  irrespective of who they are or what they look like - you may call it diversity but we see it as community and in our community, everyone belongs and everyones voice is heard. 

A specific example comes to mind is when recently a self proclaimed racist English man made remarks publicly on a news site about Māori people being the scourge of society. It upset many people and they retaliated against him. He reached out to us for help/education. It wasn't our usual demographic but we felt strongly that we were to treat him how we treat everyone. We successfully held a meeting in our barbershop with him and Māori leaders in our community. Compassion and understanding was reached because people are really hard to hate close up. 

My parents were immigrants to NZ from Samoa. I lived through a childhood of poverty, extreme domestic violence and multiple experiences of sexual abuse. My Father was a violent alcoholic and was in and out of prison throughout my upbringing. My oldest brother ended up in prison also and other issues of violence, addiction and trauma have affected my siblings. By the time I was a teenager I was suicidal but decided to seek a different path from where I came from. I ended up barbering because I felt called to start in my neighbourhood as a way to hold space and hear men that were struggling from backgrounds like mine. 

My wife Sarah comes from her own story of abuse when she was adopted out of her culture at birth and raised in mental and physical abuse. She is currently finishing off her qualification and clinical hours to be a registered therapist next year. We are passionate about this work because of where we have come from. This is real for us and genuinely we are passionate about finding solutions for the pain we experienced ourselves. We started the work with ourselves - thats what has real resonance. 

I never give up. When you know this is a calling you know that setbacks, criticism, obstacles and hard challenges are inevitable. It's the price of being in the arena. The fact that I have survived what I have in life means I know that I will get through whatever is thrown my way. 

The biggest challenge for me was losing my beloved Mother to lung cancer at the end of last year. For me her death triggered very painful feelings of powerlessness from my childhood - I wasn't able to save her in her painful life or even in her painful death. 

This occurred in one of the busiest times professionally. I still had a book to finish editing, our campaign had gone viral globally after Dwayne Johnson shared it, my businesses needed running, my family needed me, I became a nominee for a New Zealander of the year award and inside I was in so much unbearable grief.

I knew I had to reach out for support/help myself. How can I help men through painful emotions if I couldn't do the same? I got through this intensely painful time because of humbling myself to allow help in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UhP3OZ9ZCE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTm0jTQqKOg 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_jC_vEK-e4

https://www.facebook.com/100000079073368/videos/4212920588720535

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/111867813/a-cut-above-humble-christchurch-barber-changes-mens-lives

https://fb.watch/6nONtjE9YA/

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home...

It would enable us to hire staff and pay them fairly for their contribution to our work while growing sustainably - because while we are so passionate about this work we know that we cannot run this forever how we have. We have done so much since we launched in 2019. 

This has included;

1. 4 prison programs that we have created and facilitated ourselves

2.  3 highly successful online marketing campaigns have we have filmed and implemented ourselves. This has resulted in millions of views globally and generated so much awareness and other media interest. 

3. Run free therapy groups for men from prisons, rehab centres, barbershops and gatherings all over the country in indigenous spaces. 

4. Wrote an 84,000 word book detailing the work, my own story of trauma and abuse and how to break cycles of intergenerational violence offering tools/solutions we have found successful. We received no advance for this and it took 2+ years to write. Now that we have a publisher and it is being released next month, our goal is to be able to get it into prisons all over the world. 

We need global connections/staff/funds to do more of this well. 

Ministry of Development 

(The social services department of the NZ Government) - 

My wife and I are national ambassadors of theIr ANTI VIOLENCE "It's Not Okay" campaign. This department have funded projects of ours since 2018. They also funded a research evaluation of our work in the barbering community - the evaluation is publicly available;

https://www.ihi.co.nz/what-we-...

Department of Corrections

(The public service department of New Zealand charged with managing the NZ corrections/prison system) -

I became a national patron for them, have facilitated staff training for new corrections staff and successfully run 4 programs inside prison along with facilitating relationship group therapy with my wife Sarah.

AVIVA

(A Christchurch based agency that supports families to live free of violence)

https://www.avivafamilies.org....

My wife Sarah and I are ambassadors for this local refuge agency and regularly collaborate with joint projects and support their fundraisers.  

Griffith University (Gold Coast, Australia)

My wife Sarah and I are ambassadors for a program called MATE run by the Violence prevention and research team. This collaboration means (once COVID19 stops affecting our travel) that we are committed to speaking on behalf of them at various events held in the DV sector.