Te Pae Tawhiti Postgraduate Scholarship for Dave Burnside
Borrin Foundation Te Pae Tawhiti Postgraduate Scholarship
About Dave
Dave Burnside has a lived experience of mental health challenges, problematic substance use, homelessness and incarceration. He has worked for Odyssey House Trust in Auckland for 14 years, mostly in peer and consumer roles and is now part of the Odyssey Executive Team as the Lived Experience Lead. He is an external lived experience member of the NZ Corrections Pathways and Services Portfolio Board and leads the NZ Chapter of Global Freedom Scholars, supporting higher education for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. Dave has a Post Graduate Diploma in Health Science, Mental Health and Addiction (PGDipHSc), a Master’s in Law (LLM, Hons), and is a PhD candidate with the University of Auckland. His key focus in recent years has been as a lived experience educator delivering Peer Support training and supporting Post Graduate programmes at AUT and Auckland University focusing on lived experience and recovery concepts and principles. He is passionate about social justice, challenging stigma and discrimination and calling out the impact of systems on vulnerable populations, particularly in criminal justice.
What Dave is studying
Dave Burnside will be using this award to support his PhD with University of Auckland which is looking at how lived experience can initiate and support a journey of criminal desistance and recovery in others. Using an autoethnographic methodology, Dave will draw on his own experiences of interaction with the criminal justice system in Aotearoa, including multiple incarcerations. He has been closely involved with the AODTC (Te Whare Whakapiki Wairua) the Drug Courts since it started at Auckland and Waitakere courts in 2012 and his Masters in Law focused on the role of addiction in criminal persistence and desistance. Dave believes that lived experience can be powerful initiator and motivator of criminal desistance and should be embedded at all levels of our justice system, with Police, the courts and in our prisons. There is a lack of research and evidence of the efficacy of lived experience and Dave intends to address the gaps in the knowledge base with his research to enhance existing approaches and improve outcomes.
Scholarship amount
$50,000
“I am incredibly grateful to the Borrin Foundation for their support for this research. I am excited about the opportunity to contribute to a more just, inclusive, tolerant and free Aotearoa New Zealand.”