THE WANTAIM WAY
Our foundational belief: local people lead best.
Not becuse it’s the kinder approach to development – because it’s the only one that actually works at this scale, in this terrain, across a country with 800+ distinct cultures. In Manus, that’s who we are.
We are not fly-in, fly-out. Our PNG team lives in Manus communities we work with, many volunteering for years before any of this had a name. That’s why we’ve deliberately stayed in one province rather than spreading across PNG – personal relationships take time to build in Melanesian culture, and our knowledge of this place, its people and it’s way of doing things is strongest where we ‘ve put in that time.
HOW WE WORK
This belief shapes everything about how we work, in four ways:
1. Relationships take time. In Melanesian culture, relationships are everything — and they can’t be rushed. Our success depends on local knowledge, personal networks, and a real understanding of context. Wantaim PNG commits to building relationships that last, not programmes that end.
2. Everyone, or no one. Rural Manus communities are flat societies — there’s no hierarchy that makes it acceptable to help one village and not its neighbour. Yet that’s exactly the approach commonly applied by others: one community here, another there, and plenty of nearby communities who miss out entirely. We see the inequality that creates, in a place where inequality doesn’t otherwise exist. That’s why our programmes target entire districts or the whole province, not isolated pilot sites.
3. Build with what’s already there. With 80–90% of the population lacking access to basic services, solutions that depend on external resources can’t scale fast enough to meet the need. So we design programmes around local skills, local labour and local ownership — capability that stays, not aid that has to keep arriving.
4. Democracy takes time. We give it that. Communities decide together, not through one person’s call. That means locating and gathering every relevant stakeholder — elders, family heads, women’s groups — before a decision can be made at all. Across Manus’s terrain, that alone can take real time. It’s not inefficiency. It’s democracy, done properly.
We build our programmes to factor in these community decision-making processes, because getting the right people in the room is critical. It’s why the work holds once we’re not the ones doing it.
OUR FOUNDER
That approach isn’t a strategy we adopted. It comes from where Wantaim PNG started — after our Founder & CEO, Lynne Shori, returned to Manus in 2007 to meet her PNG family for the first time. Ten days later, her brother Fred died in a diving accident off Rambutso Island — a sliding-doors moment Lynne resolved to act on. Wantaim PNG was formed within months.
In 2010, Lynne left a 20-year career in corporate strategy at large ASX-listed companies to focus on Wantaim PNG full time — a combination of personal ties to Manus and professional discipline that still shapes how the organisation runs today.
Read Lynne’s full story.