How EMPA Alum Polly Martin works with survivors of abuse in care

ANZSOG alum Polly Martin is using her varied career, lived experience and the skills she developed during her Executive Master of Public Administration (EMPA) in a new role to support some of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most vulnerable people. 

Ms Martin was recently appointed as Executive Director of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Survivor Experiences Service, for people who experienced abuse in state and faith-based care.  

The role was established as a result of a Royal Commission into New Zealand’s state care system – in response to feedback from survivors to the Royal Commission that they wanted other survivors to have access to a safe space to share their experiences.  

In addition, it provides a records support function that assists survivors to locate and access their records. The service is also able to provide insights to those designing the new redress system and to the care system about the nature of abuse.  

Ms Martin says her lived experience from her childhood history of  being in cross-cultural adoptions, foster care, faith-based and state care, gives her a deeper understanding of her work. 

“I’ve spent most of my adult life searching for my information, and I’ve had to spend a lot of time working on myself. So I have a deep compassion for survivors who struggle similarly, and it’s been a privilege to advocate for them,” she said. 

“I want to provide good advice to our colleagues who are working on the new redress system, so they understand what survivors have experienced, and what might be most useful as part of redress. Because redress isn’t just about compensation, it’s about other services that assist our survivors to be able to live well.” 

It’s been a long professional journey for Ms Martin to get to this point. She says she has had a fruit salad career’, but believed she had learned something from every job. 

“I’ve been a music teacher and a musician. I’ve had the privilege of serving as a social worker in a number of settings. I’ve worked in service and organisational design, engaged with communities to inform service and policy development and I’ve been an archivist with responsibilities for our constitutional documents,” she said. 

“I’ve also been a kai waiata and kaitito, composing and leading waiata (songs) so that my public service colleagues can confidently participate in pōwhiri (formal welcomes) and mihi whakatau (less formal welcomes).”  

“I’ve been really grateful for all those learning opportunities that come with being a public servant. And I love to provide services that are meaningful and useful for people.” 

Helping governments to work for communities

Ms Martin’s previous senior role as director at Archives New Zealand, which is part of the Department of Internal Affairs, built on some of her work with Maori communities, and her understanding of how hard it could be for them to access government records. 

“I was working in primary health care, and was approached by Archives New Zealand. They needed somebody who knew how to work in communities, and could assist communities to understand how to manage their archival history and memories,” she said. She also worked in the regulation of government records; their creation, maintenance and disposal.  

“When we knew that there was going to be a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, I was asked to pick up Archives New Zealand’s response. This entailed assessing what records we had that the commission might need, digitising some five million items for the Commission’s investigations, providing information management advice to assist Crown agencies to know how best to respond to the commission’s expectations. All of this while ensuring that our staff working with the records were trauma-informed and were provided with well-being support for their work to mitigate vicarious trauma” 

“The reality is survivors don’t know that records might exist or how to find them. Survivors often have to go to the agencies responsible for abusing them to get their information, and the contents of those records can be really challenging to read. 

“I was able to understand this because I had a social work background. So, again, my previous careers have been really helpful in each role that I’ve played.” 

Ms Martin says that her EMPA experience expanded her leadership skills and allowed her to meet and work with public servants from different agencies and jurisdictions within her cohort. 

“The EMPA changed my life. It’s exposed me to concepts, thoughts, conversations that I would never have been able to have. I met some amazingly smart and gifted public service leaders in my cohorts and have actually been rather awestruck,” she said. 

“But that gave me a huge amount of confidence that, yes, I had something to contribute, and I was able to bring a different set of experiences and a different lens to the work that we all do. So I was able to reciprocate the learning they were providing for me.” 

“We learnt a lot about experiences of massive political change and how to adapt to it, from people who had gone through really difficult experiences. A lot of those insights have been extremely useful in the role that I’m in.” 

“It’s helped me have language to engage in conversations, where before I used to sit there like a deer in the headlights. Now I have the language and I have the understanding of where people are coming from, so I can contribute into those conversations.” 

Leading with humility

Ms Martin said she believed leaders had to be humble and self-aware in order to lead effectively in sensitive spaces such as her new role. She said that exploring her Māori identity and Māori concepts of leadership had helped her to shape her own leadership style. 

“For me one key quality is ‘rangatiratanga’, this is not just about having a title, it’s also about having the trust of your people and your peers so that you can make decisions when you’re leading. If you can break the word ‘rangatiratanga’ down into its different components, it effectively means your ability to bring people together and to lead them,” she said. 

“Another quality is ‘manaakitanga’. That’s the ability to ensure that my staff and those I serve are not made less than as a result of their relationships and interactions with me. It also means that when we engage with people, that we are cognisant of their circumstances, that we make sure that we provide kai (food), or travel assistance, or make sure that they have the tools to be able to engage with us in such a way that it doesn’t leave them out of pocket or exhausted.  

The new agency is an interim agency and Ms Martin said that her goal is to help advise what functions that survivors need which could be provided by the new redress agency, and to ensure that the Crown has options as to whether it can be involved in a redress system.  

“I’m here to help this service really target its resources and its energies into areas where we think have most need, and to create great relationships with people that work with survivors. I want to help make sure that we do this better, and we don’t make the same mistakes that we’ve made for quite some time now,” she said. 

She said that it was a challenge for the public service to maintain the diversity of backgrounds and experiences it needed to be able to effectively work with minorities and marginalised communities. 

“To be able to work alongside people who have diverse experiences, to learn from people who think completely differently to yourself  – that’s not easy, because you have to be able to be humble and patient. I think the public service has got to be really mindful of not developing groupthink,” she said. 

“People from the survivor community often have a history where they’ve been on the wrong side of the law, or they haven’t had access to a quality education. They struggle to manage their trauma so that they can participate in society.  

“If we’re going to serve the communities, we’ve got to understand them, and you can’t understand them if there’s a grand canyon between your experience and theirs. We often make policy decisions that are uninformed because of this, and I think that seems to have been our experience within the care sector over the years in New Zealand.” 

“I think for New Zealand, we went through a long period of time where we didn’t really have any Māori, or Tangata o le Moana (people of the Pacific) or Asian people in our senior leadership, you just didn’t see them. The tide is beginning to change and I’m grateful for that because it means we’ve got a better way of being able to reach into communities that are not monocultural.”