Abstract: Journeys Towards Equality describes and analyses all the major work in New Zealand to counter discrimination against people with experience of mental illness. As the size of this report suggests, there is a lot of it going on in many agencies and sectors. Yet most of this work has only started in the last decade.
An initial major development was the amendment of the Human Rights Act in 1994 to include protections for people with disabilities. In the same year the Office of the Health and Disability Commissioner opened. The Mental Health Commission, with its mandate to reduce discrimination, started operating in 1996 and published the Blueprint in 1998. In the same year the Like Minds, Like Mine project began. The Ministry of Health’s 1997 mental health strategy, Moving Forward, included an anti-discrimination objective, although no targets were set. Also in 1997 the national Mental Health Sector Standards created a standard for promoting community acceptance of people with mental illness. And in 2001 the government published the New Zealand Disability Strategy, before setting up the Office for Disability Issues in 2002.

Abstract: There is growing recognition of the appropriateness, importance, and value of Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR) in the field of public health. Implemented rigorously, CBPR enhances the relevance and use of the data (Israel et al., 2005; Viswanathan et al., 2004; Minkler and Wallerstein, 2003). This paper describes a design which engaged, from the outset and in all phases of the research process, members from migrant communities (the target communities) and key stakeholders from multiple sectors, representing and serving them in a research partnership with academic researchers. This paper draws on the findings (minutes of meetings, qualitative observation, stakeholder discussion, and evaluative data) of a two-year research study of structural influences on Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) in migrant African communities in London, the results of which have been published elsewhere (Marais, 2007). This study used a multi-method CBPR design, combining quantitative and qualitative methods with an integrated framework to evaluate the process and outcome of the research partnership. The emphasis here is on the pivotal components of the design — the engagement of community participants (members from the target communities) as Community Advisory Panel (CAP) partners and/or Community Research Fieldworkers (CRFs).