Schools and Rangatahi
Why schools and rangatahi matter
Young people are navigating complex social worlds — in classrooms, sports teams, online spaces, and whānau. These are the environments where norms about relationships, respect, and power are formed. When those norms go unexamined, harm can take root early and follow people into adulthood.
Schools are uniquely placed to shift this. When rangatahi have a language for healthy relationships, when teachers and parents feel equipped to have hard conversations, and when communities model the behaviours they want young people to carry forward — that is prevention at its most powerful.
What we offer
RISE works directly with schools, kura, and youth settings to deliver education and support that is practical, age-appropriate, and grounded in the realities rangatahi are actually facing.
Through Hikitia! and our wider prevention work, we offer programmes and workshops covering safe and healthy relationships, consent, emotional regulation, online harm and safety, and navigating difficult situations with confidence. We work with rangatahi directly, and alongside the teachers and parents who support them, because lasting change requires the whole environment to shift, not just the young people in it.
Young people's social lives don't separate neatly into online and offline — what happens in a group chat spills into the classroom, what starts on the playground continues online. Be There for Rangatahi meets young people where they actually are.
The programme builds active bystander skills for the spaces rangatahi spend their time — recognising when something isn't right, knowing how to support a peer who is being targeted, and having the confidence to step in or speak up rather than scroll past. Using a practical framework of everyday actions, rangatahi develop the awareness, empathy, and courage to look out for one another — online, in class, on the field, and in their communities.
These are practised skills that grow with use, and that ripple outward — into whānau, into future workplaces, and into the kind of communities we all want to live in.
Get involved
If you are a school, kura, youth organisation, or community group wanting to explore what's possible, we'd love to hear from you.
Contact us at admin@rise.net.nz or visit bethere.nz/schools to learn more about the Be There for Schools programme.