Mental Health Awareness Week 2025 – Top Up Together in Aotearoa

ME ARO TONU / TAKE NOTICE
TUKUA / GIVE
ME KORI TONU / BE ACTIVE
ME WHAKAWHANAUNGA / CONNECT
ME AKO TONU / KEEP LEARNING

Mental Health Awareness Week runs from 6 to 12 October 2025 and this year’s theme, Top Up Together encourages us to bring the Five Ways to Wellbeing into your life (and your workplace or whanau).

So we’ve put some practical, local and seasonal suggestions together for how to bring the Five Ways to Wellbeing into your life with the idea being that we lean into what and who bring us energy.

• RSVP to Our Voice Hui and BBQ on Monday 6 October from 1pm – 2.30pm. Our Voice is an Equip community network open to anyone in the Waitematā region who has lived experience of mental health or addiction challenges.
• Host a shared morning tea or lunch. The weather is warming up so you could even make it a picnic, beach or park meet up!
• Walk and talk (or in silence!) with a neighbour.
• Check in with someone you haven’t heard from in a while. Why not send a message, have a kōrero, or arrange a catch up in person.
• Organise a potluck dinner. Choose a hero ingredient or cuisine to theme each dish around or just leave it open to your guests to decide what to bring.
• Host a kōrero night. How often do people say that their whanau get together to sit around talking until all hours, only when friends and family visit from out of town or there’s another big organised celebration? Why not get everyone around this week, just for a really good kōrero and catch up, then make it a regular thing.
• Host a pot luck board game night (or day)! Ask everyone to bring a favourite board game or a deck of cards. If you’re looking to expand your games collection, you’ll often find good quality, second hand games and puzzles at op shops and markets.
• Organise a whanau hui. For some whanau, having a regular time each week, fortnight or month, is a way to make sure that they prioritise time for their whanau. Remember – whanau looks different for everyone. So if your neighbours, school or work community are your whanau – amazing – organise a hui and try to make it a regular thing.
• Join a local group like a gardening, book club, photography or walking club – search for groups online and attend one of their meetings this week. Find PSNZ Photographic Society clubs near you or type into your search engine “Book Clubs in *location* or “Gardening Clubs in *location*
• Start or revive a wellbeing circle in your workplace: a short catch up each day or week to share how you’re doing.
• Visit Maungakiekie / One Tree Hill. Invite a neighbour to go with you to climb the volcanic cone, view the city, and walk together while sharing stories or learning about local history
• Take someone to visit Eden Garden in Mount Eden – wander the gardens, take photographs and chat about everything there is to see.
• Have a cook and Kai (eat) night. Choose a hero ingredient for each person or a theme, then invite everyone over with their surprise ingredient to prepare an off the cuff meal together!
• Forest / ngahere walk with rongoā learning: some places offer guided forest walks teaching about medicinal native plants and tikanga. Make a road trip of it and visit Sanctuary Mountain Sanctuary Mountain or stay local and head to one of the many bush walks in Tāmaki Makaurau
• Head to a library or community centre pop-up. Head to the Auckland Libraries website to see what’s on
• Art in public spaces: invite people to meet in a park to sketch or support a local artist by visiting an exhibition.
• Take a friend or the kids to the Auckland Art Gallery
• Volunteer for a clean up or restoration planting project: check local environmental groups for a project you can join together with friends and whanau.
• Opshop till you drop! Grab a friend and go on an opshop mission!
• Find MHAW events near you on their website

• Help at your community garden. You could help with weeding or planting native plants in a community garden or reserve. Donate seeds, seedlings, or compost
• Volunteer for a restoration project or planting day with www.pestfreekaipatiki.org.nz
• Help a neighbour, rangatahi, or local group. It could be as simple as sitting with someone over a cup of tea. Offer to babysit, mow a lawn, or bring them lunch
• Leave water dishes out for native birds or wildlife especially if it’s dry in your area
• Organise a dog walking group in your neighbourhood
• Look into volunteering at a local shelter or find out what they might need. Some shelters have drives where they ask for old towels and blankets – reach out to see how you could help.
• Take a look at what local events are coming up with Forest & Bird
• Start a collection for upcoming Christmas donation drives. Share it with your community to see what others would like to contribute. This is an activity you could involve your tamariki in too. Have a list of jobs that they could do to earn some pocket money. Explain that some of the money for your pocket money will be going towards helping others. They could then have a budget and walk around the supermarket buying things that they think a whanau in need might like to have for the upcoming Christmas season
• Become a member – sometimes called a ‘friend of the gallery’ at your local art gallery. Volunteering at community art centres means they can open for longer or better hours and is not just good for the artists but also good for the volunteers who get to connect with visitors.
• Start a beginners Dungeons & Dragons group and help those who don’t know how to get started, meet other players

• Join Equip at the Steps for Strengths, Fun Run or Walk at Parrs Park in Glen Eden – Wednesday 8 October from 11.00am to 1.00pm
• Head into the māra (garden). Plant kūmara or other seasonal produce in your garden or community plot. Digging, preparing soil, planting moves your body and connects you to the land. Here’s the Tui planting guide for October and a gardening by the moon cycles guide from Koanga
• Forage for rongoā (traditional native medicinal plants) in your backyard or nearest reserve. Use a plant identification app like iNaturalist or NZ Plant Conservation Network to journal what you find. There are also books available at your local library and bookshops to help too or an identification guide you can download from here
• Go for a gentle walk or jog along your local reserve, beach or bush track
• Try a casual walk and talk with a colleague or friend instead of sitting in a café
• Join one of the many walking groups at Walking New Zealand
• Do a mini circuit in your backyard or living room: 10 squats, 10 stretches, 10 breaths, repeat 3 times.
• Sign up to a yoga class or something more energetic if you will
• Have a kanikani / dance party at home!

• Photography at home. Carry a camera or use your phone camera to walk through your garden or a local park. Watch how the light changes: early morning sun, dappled shade, shadows shifting. Take photographs of things that catch your eye – bark, leaves, spider webs, patterns in soil
• Smell. In each place you go today, notice and count the number of different smells in the air. Take a few breaths and name them (e.g. sea salt, earth, flowers, wood)
• Sound. Sit quietly for 5 minutes outside, or by an open window. Notice the sounds you hear – cars, birds, wind, voices, and the feelings in your body – temperature, tension, softening
• Observe. Keep a “noticing journal” for the week. Each day, jot down one small detail you noticed but might otherwise overlook. You could do this activity with a friend and meet or call each other to talk about what you noticed through the week. It’s a good activity to involve the whanau in as well and something you can all talk about at the dinner table.
• Listen. Make a new play list of music, waiata or hymns. Listen to the words and the meaning behind them. How do they make you feel? What do you think the artist was trying to convey?
• Gratitude. Make a list of all the things you’re grateful. Head to the Equip wellness hub for some helpful prompts.

• Mental Health First Aid. Sign up to the waitlist for an Equip Mental Health First Aid Workshop
• Learn the National Anthem in Te Reo
• Upskill. Apply to upskill through distance learning which is offered by many institutions around Aotearoa or consider kanohi ki te kanohi (face to face) at a campus nearby. Many institutions offer scholarships and some workplaces have professional development programmes. Look into all the possibilities that might be available to you.
• Micro courses in an area that interests you can be a way to learn and foster your interests without having to commit long term. You can find all sorts of things online, mindfulness, seed saving, local ecology, mahi / work related courses – the internet is your oyster!
• Cook something new and challenge yourself to follow a new recipe every week.
• Reading at Home whether its a short non-fiction on wellbeing, te ao Māori, local ecology, or whenua. Need some inspiration? Heres the Whitcoulls Top 100, Kete Books bestsellers, Unity Books reviews
• Listen to a new podcast and keep a playlist of podcasts to come back to. Play them in your car, while your cooking or even while you’re getting ready in the morning. You’ll find a list of podcasts to get started with in our Wellness Hub
• Reading together by creating a “book swap” or “reading circle” in your friend or work group. Ask each person to bring a book and share a page that they enjoyed.
• Karakia to start your day, open or close a meeting with. We’ve made a list of some commonly used karakia for you to get started.
• Try a short te reo Māori lesson. Use apps like Kupu, Drops, borrow Māori Made Easy from your library or check for local beginner classes. You can even get started online here 
• Parenting courses can help to raise balanced kids, stay balanced in mind as a parent and give you new tools in the kete. We can recommend The Parenting Place to get you started
• ‘How to Draw a….’ Youtube tutorials can open up a window to a new creative you! You can search on almost anything from ‘How to draw a realistic mountain scene’ to ‘How to draw a butterfly’ to ‘How to draw realistic facial features’