ADHD NZ 2021: Past, Present and Future

​ADHD NZ 2021: past, present and future

Our organisation started in 1979 as a support group for people with children with ADHD.

​As a registered charity, we're still a small organisation with two part-time paid staff members, one part-time contractor and a handful of volunteers who, with specialised knowledge, sit on our Board to govern our activities or help us manage our 50,000-strong communities of financial and non-financial members and with our meetups and online Facebook and LinkedIn communities. ​

Our vision is to advance the ADHD community in New Zealand by providing practical information and support. Our role is to help people living with ADHD by helping them with their ADHD journey.

Raewyn, our National Coordinator, is one of our part-time paid staff members. Raewyn manages numerous enquiries from people seeking information and advice on how they or their child can get assessed and possibly diagnosed with ADHD. She also facilitates queries from people wanting help from healthcare professionals, with challenges at work, or from parents wanting to know how to navigate the education system so they can get the support their children need at school.

​​Some things are broken and we intend to fix them

Every week we hear from dozens of people with ADHD as well as parents and partners, so we think we have a pretty good idea of what the challenges are.

ADHD NZ Strategy

Our focus is on identifying issues for our community and advocating hard to make changes happen.

We’ve put together a strategy to fix the big issues as we see them. In short, we're focused on achieving these things:

  • ease of getting a diagnosis and support 
  • children who have ADHD will be successful at school
  • adults who have ADHD will be successful in their job and relationships, and
  • through research and studies, we will gather evidence and data showing the challenges our ADHD community face so that we can talk persuasively to government and others about the changes we need them to make​