Gerard Hoffman - Chairperson

I am a registered Clinical Social Worker and Counsellor with 35 years of social work and leadership experience working within Justice, Health and Education sectors.

Or the past 20 years I have led clinical mental health and counselling teams in District Health Board and University settings in Australia and NZ.

My areas of special interest have included working in and developing community based sexual offender treatment programmes and adolescent and young adult mental health services. 
Following my undergraduate degree at Victoria University I completed a Post Graduate Social Work degree at Canterbury. I originally trained in offender-victim mediation and restorative practice as part of the NZ Justice Department’s sentence of Reparation in the mid 1980s and spent eight years working as a Probation Officer.

My most recent role as Associate Director, Student Counselling at Victoria included helping develop whole of University sexual violence prevention, safety and wellbeing strategies.

I have presented at conferences and within work settings on suicide prevention, youth mental health and wellbeing promotion.

I have extensive experience in facilitating restorative processes with students who have experienced interpersonal harm. 

Brian J Hunt

I am a registered Gestalt psychotherapist with a Masters in Gestalt therapy.

During the past 15 years I have been fortunate in that my therapeutic work has been across different cultures and ethnicities giving me a broad view on humanity and how we operate as individuals within a diverse national and global community.
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After living in Australia for 37 years I returned to NZ in 2017. My work as a therapist has taken me to many interesting places. I developed a drug and alcohol counselling and educational service for indigenous communities in 
the Northern Territory; worked with male perpetrators of family violence; developed and facilitated a program for boys in schools on respecting women and girls; and worked as a critical incident and trauma psychotherapist for the maritime and mining industries in Queensland, as a counsellor for ex-military service personnel suffering from PTSD and combat fatigue.

My core experience and knowledge of human development and behaviour has been accumulated over the past 15-20 years from a mix of private practice and working for social services NGO’s in either; a leadership or as a psychotherapist/counsellor role.

​In New Zealand, I have worked as an addiction psychotherapist in a multidisciplinary mental health team treating people with poor mental health and addictions issues.

Throughout my career, I have maintained a disciplined approach to learning more about the craft of psychotherapy this has included researching current breakthroughs in psycho neuroscience, and recent discoveries of the brain’s connection and reaction to psychological and the somatic responses to early life trauma.

​Areas of special interest: Anger management and the integration of Gestalt psychotherapy. Couples therapy, intimacy and relationship issues. Domestic and family violence including the many un-named or un-acknowledged layers of domestic violence that escape scrutiny. Therapeutic life coaching, depression, low self-esteem, anxiety, grief and loss, relationship issues, work and career stress, life transitions, parenting, spirituality, and difficulties caused by addictions, trauma and abuse.