Ex-Gang Member Heals New Zealand's Hardest to Reach

In Hawke's Bay, New Zealand, a former gang member is doing what decades of tough-on-crime policies couldn't: reaching men everyone else has given up on.

Lucky Te Koha knows exactly what it takes to leave gang life because he lived it. He joined his first street gang as a teenager and moved through other groups for years before finding a new calling as a Christian pastor.

Now he walks into spaces most church leaders would never enter. Every two months, Lucky meets with a Mongrel Mob chapter in a local church, running check-in sessions where men talk about addiction, shame, parenting struggles, and keeping their families together.

His approach stands in sharp contrast to New Zealand's recent crackdown. The country banned gang patches in public in 2024, strengthened non-consorting laws, and expanded prisons. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon declared gangs are "no longer above the law."

But Lucky believes punitive measures miss the point. He sees men carrying deep trauma, many of them Māori from lower socio-economic communities who grew up mistrusting police and government agencies.

"I don't go in there and tell them they have to leave the gang," Lucky says. Instead, he tries to influence what happens around gang life: in homes, relationships, and in the lives of children growing up inside that world.

His own story gives him credibility. Lucky spent time in foster care and at Cherry Farm, a psychiatric institution near Dunedin, where he says he was sexually abused. He shared his experience with New Zealand's Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, which examined links between institutional trauma and gang formation.

Professor Tracey McIntosh from the University of Auckland sees those connections clearly. "It's impossible to look at the formation of gangs without recognising the really significant state engagement," she says, pointing to practices in boys' homes that later appeared in gang culture.

Why This Inspires

Lucky's work addresses something punitive laws can't touch: the silence men have been taught to keep. "We come from a world of silence," he explains. "Once we share it, it comes out of our puku, out of our stomach, out of the dark and it gets put into the light."

That vulnerability costs something, but it lifts shame. Some of the men in Lucky's programs participated in a rare 2023 gang hui where members from different gangs came together to speak about abuse and trauma.

For Lucky, watching private shame become something men could name together was transformative. The work is slow and unglamorous, but it's changing lives one conversation at a time.

In communities where gang membership now outnumbers police officers, Lucky offers what laws cannot: a path toward healing that meets people exactly where they are.