Stretton Unfiltered

Annah went to Norway and Scotland with one question: what happens when prison becomes more than simply somewhere we detain women? RAW independently funded the research, taking Annah inside Skien Women’s Prison in Norway and HMP Stirling in Scotland, two women’s prisons taking thought-leading approaches to detention. What she found was opportunity embedded into the day. Work. Education. Skills. Relationships. Responsibility. Normality. Time being used rather than simply served. Back in New Zealand, those observations became a 33,000-word discussion paper examining what could translate to Aotearoa and how it connects with 12 years of RAW experience. In this episode Annah is joined by her sister Rebecca Maxwell, RAW’s Clinical Operations Manager, to bring that conversation back to the Rangiora Women’s Unit at Waikeria, where RAW is already challenging what a day in prison could look like through Haea te Ata. This isn’t about making prison easy. It’s about asking what we want imprisonment to achieve. Because she’s coming out anyway. What opportunities will she have had before she walks out the gate?

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Frances Valintine left school early and didn’t make it to university until her 40s. She then went on to become one of New Zealand’s most influential voices in technology and education, building The Mind Lab, Tech Futures Lab and academyEX, and challenging some pretty entrenched ideas about when, where and how we’re supposed to learn. But this isn’t really a conversation about tech. It’s about what happens when we refuse to decide that we’ve learnt enough, met enough people, taken enough risks or had our most interesting years. Frances and I talk about education later in life, the damage many of us still carry from our school years, the people we surround ourselves with, loneliness, ageing, relevance and the extraordinary value of remaining curious. Frances is now taking those ideas into Love Heart, a new venture built around social learning and connection later in life. I’ve approached a similar challenge through Sisterhood Social, creating an interesting intersection between two women who believe our worlds should expand as we age, not quietly contract. And perhaps that’s the bigger question running through this episode: When did we decide getting older meant becoming less curious?

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This is not an easy listen… but it's an important one. In this episode of Stretton Unfiltered, Annah sits down with Krystal, a woman she has walked alongside for over a decade through RAW, to trace the relationship back to where it began… in a safe house, in the middle of active addiction, at the start of what RAW would eventually become.
Krystal shares what it was like being born into crisis, raised without the tools to parent her own children, and caught for years in relationships where she was harmed, and at times, harmful herself.
This is not a story with a neat before and after. It's an honest account of repeating the same pattern over and over… and what it actually took to break it.
Now studying towards a Bachelor of Counselling, Krystal has spent years researching coercive control off her own back, drawing on her own lived experience on both sides of it to build a way of explaining the pattern to other women before it closes around them.
A conversation about survival, accountability, and what it really takes to stop going back.

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New Zealand's conversation around motherhood and work has suddenly become political again, with paid parental leave now firmly on the election agenda. But beyond the politics, what does making motherhood and work coexist actually look like?
Annah and Sami take the conversation into lived experience, tracing three generations of working motherhood through Vicki, Annah and now Sami. From raising five children in a very different era, to building a company while the children grew up inside it, to Sami navigating River, work and a very different model of parenting today.
They also turn the lens on themselves as employers. Flexibility matters, but in a small business every decision has consequences. What can employers realistically provide, what should government support, and what do working mothers actually need?
Three generations. Very different choices. Plenty they'd do differently. And no perfect answer.
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There is no shortage of opinions about methamphetamine in New Zealand. Another headline. Another police operation. Another devastated family. Another community asking how things got so bad.
But there's one voice that's almost always missing from that conversation: the people who have actually lived it.
In this episode of Stretton Unfiltered, Annah sits down with Ina, who has been part of the RAW whānau for more than ten years. Through the trust built over a decade, Ina agreed to a rare, honest conversation…not to sensationalise meth, and not to seek sympathy, but to help answer a question New Zealand rarely stops to ask: why does it continue to make sense to the people whose lives have become entwined with it?
Ina takes us back to where it started. At nine years old, she spoke up about abuse within her own family. That betrayal shaped everything that followed…the running away, the drinking, and eventually, methamphetamine. 
This isn't a conversation about judgement. It's a conversation about curiosity, and about listening to the people our public conversation so often talks about, but so rarely talks to.
Ina is in recovery, not recovered. She's honest about what that took…a daughter's one request, a chance reconnection, and a decision to keep choosing a different life, every single day.
A conversation about the questions New Zealand keeps asking about meth, and the answers we've been missing because we haven't been listening to the right people.
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