Pania Paraku.
Pania Paraku has dedicated 20 years of her career to ICT, eight of which were with Spark New Zealand leading their Māori Strategy, one of the first in the industry.
Her career is grounded in Service Management across Hospitality, Tertiary Education, ICT and more recently Health and Wellbeing.
Pania has been the consumer representative with the Health Quality Safety Commission for multiple terms as a member of the Perinatal & Maternal Mortality Review Committee and Nga Pou Arawhenua the Māori Caucus which sits across Suicide, Family Violence, Perinatal, Perioperative and Child and Youth mortality review committees from 2017 – 2022. She led the KUPU Application development at Spark which would win the Supreme Award from Te Taura Whiri for Te Reo Māori Language Revitalisation. Today, requests continue from countries around the world to assist their own Indigenous language revitalisation strategies, most recently Pania presented alongside the CEO of Te Taura Whiri and Ministry of Education Head of Māori to the Indigenous peoples of Chile and the Chilean Embassy.
Pania comes with a Master of Māoriand Indigenous Leadership, Māoriand Indigenous Leadership from the University of Canterbury; a DipTTP, Te Tohu Paetahi from the University of Waikato; a PG Dip Business Admin (Business Law) from Massy University and a Bachelor of Commerce from Lincoln University.
Pania shares between 4 and 20 kids with her husband: four of their own here in Aotearoa NZ and sixteen host or whangai kids (now young adults) from six countries around the world.
Her personal purpose is ‘kanohi kitea’ to ensure the people of this land and those who choose this land as their home, are seen, connected, and empowered in the hope that together we will make Aotearoa an even better place for generations to come. Her elders posed the tono … “if not you then who”? and she believes that this tono can apply to everyone.
key skills includeService Management across Hospitality, Tertiary Education, ICT and more recently Health and Wellbeing