The Backbone Collective launched in March 2017 but has grown out of many years of hard work, commitment, passion and many voluntary hours from a number of women who have come together to create an organisation that aims to make a change for good.

Ruth Herbert and Deborah Mackenzie had worked in the domestic violence sector for many years, on the same team on a number of occasions, both endeavouring to improve the way the system (all the services and processes) responds to women and children when they experience violence and abuse.

In 2014, Ruth’s consultancy company, The Impact Collective published The Way Forward, proposing the establishment of an integrated system to better address intimate partner violence and child abuse and neglect in New Zealand. The Impact Collective contracted Deborah to co-author this document with Ruth.

This is Backbone’s founding document.

A central component of that model was the independent backbone agency; it would sit outside of government and be the glue that ensured central government agencies, and national governance and advisory groups were linked with local communities where services were. Ruth and Deborah saw that the system itself needed to be able to gather information to enable it to continuously improve. Collecting the experiences of service users (people who use the system and services) was seen as one of the critical functions of the backbone agency to help inform, design and evaluate the system response.  

Neither Ruth nor Deborah were in a position to establish or operate the backbone agency as defined in The Way Forward. However, while they waited for those ideas to propagate and hoped that government would take action, they decided to take their own action - to get victim survivor voices to the table to find out more about how the system is or isn’t working.  The Backbone Collective seedling began to germinate.

In 2016, Ruth serendipitously met up with Tania Domett, a researcher and policy analyst with a background in feminist and women-centred research.  She founded a research and evaluation consultancy in 2014, Cogo Consulting, that works with many agencies and organisations, providing evidence-based solutions to improve the work that they do. Over the coming months Ruth, Tania and Deborah discussed possible ways of connecting with victim/survivors to bring their voices and experiences to the fore front of policy design and service provision. Tania was able to set up technology systems to help Backbone gather information from survivors and report back to them the results.  Using online survey software was the key to reaching thousands of women survivors.

Backbone was also supported by Laura Tulloch of Digital Marketing B&T, who developed our online communications strategy and set up/wrote Backbone’s blog page and content, Backbone's website reports page, social media platforms, our newsletter database and our online donations platform. The small and voluntary team of four then had a way to bring their vision to life and The Backbone Collective, an independent and unfunded organisation, was born.

Since its inception Backbone has also been supported by a small number of women who have volunteered their time to work on projects, sharing their insights and experiences to help us create surveys and material that was accessible and appropriate. These women can’t be named due to their personal situations, but their input is appreciated by Backbone and helped us become the organisation we are today.

Due to differing situations, three of the initial core team of the four core workers have regrettably had to step away from their work with Backbone.  In mid-2017 due to the demands of running her own business Tania had to leave us. However, her input in the early stages was critical to Backbone’s ongoing growth and success. In 2018, also due to the demands of running her own business, Laura too had to step away. Backbone is grateful to her commitment and time which helped us create a brand that reflects the principles and tone of our organisation. Then at the end of 2019 Ruth made the decision to step away from Backbone, in order to pursue some completely unrelated opportunities. Ruth had invested countless hours (largely unpaid and extremely emotionally demanding) into Backbone during its first three years of operation and Backbone will always be grateful to Ruth for her vision, commitment, passion and insight which was fundamental to the creation of Backbone and its development into the organisation it is today.