About Us

Our Ministry is all about helping to build successful individuals and in turn building strong, healthy families and communities.

It's a big job - we're tackling some of the big issues in society, like reducing long term welfare dependency and preventing family violence and child abuse.

We're working towards this through providing:

• Care and protection of vulnerable children and young people
• Employment, income support and superannuation services
• Funding to community service providers
• Social policy and advice to government
• Student allowances and loans.

Our work touches the lives of more than one million New Zealanders. In 2014/15 we:

• Provided services and assistance to more than 1.1 million New Zealanders and 110,000 New Zealand families
• Processed over 200,000 applications for main benefits
• Held over 14,000 family group conferences for vulnerable children and young people
• Took more than 12 million calls in our call centres
• Provided services out of 224 locations nationwide
• Completed 29,000 housing needs assessments
• Have more than 666,000 SuperGold Card holders and 6,580 SuperGold Card partners representing 11,235 business outlets
• Processed 45 million transactions on our systems
• Processed over 360,000 applications for financial assistance to study.

This is not work we do alone. We work closely with other government agencies, non-government organisations, advisory and industry group and communities and iwi. Together we aim to make a positive and lasting difference in the lives of New Zealanders.

Our purpose

We help New Zealanders to help themselves to be safe, strong and independent.

Ko ta mātou he whakamana tangata kia tū haumaru, kia tū kaha, kia tū motuhake.

To turn our vision into a reality we need great people who share our values and who can:

• Own what we all do
• Take responsibility for what we do
• Understand our role in the big picture, who can help us and who we can help
• Navigate through ambiguity and the opportunity it brings to create better ways of doing things
• Act with integrity, courage and transparency, and
• Celebrate our achievements and those of our clients.

Join us and help make a difference in the lives of all New Zealanders.

Our structure

We are large and unique and at the very heart of supporting everyday New Zealanders to lead better lives.

We are New Zealand's largest government department employing people in 300 locations around the country. To provide our diverse range of services in the best possible way, we've teamed up our nine business groups into three clusters.