Gerard Hoffman, BCA. PGDip SW. Dip YouthDev. Cert Supv. Cert Drug Alcohol. RSW. MANZASW

Senior Consultant

wallhoff435@gmail.com

Gerard Hoffman has spent the past 35 years working in a range of social work, counselling and therapy roles in justice, health and tertiary education settings in New Zealand and Australia. This has included clinical work in child, youth and family mental health services, relationships counselling services and family violence and sexual violence treatment and prevention. For the past twenty years he has also been in leadership and management roles within hospital/district health board and University health and counselling services.

Gerard has worked extensively in the areas of restorative practice, suicide prevention, wellbeing promotion and in presenting and providing training in the areas of sexual violence prevention, suicide intervention, psychological first aid, coaching, and individual and organisational mental health and wellbeing promotion. He has been involved in a range of restorative practice contracts including as a part of the NZ Ministry of Health Surgical Mesh Listening Circle Restorative facilitation team in 2019. 

Following his undergraduate degree at Victoria University Gerard completed a Postgraduate Social Work degree at the University of Canterbury. He originally trained in offender-victim mediation and restorative practice as part of the New Zealand Justice Department’s sentence of Reparation in the mid 1980s and spent eight years working as a Probation Officer. Gerard spent 18 years as Manager of the Student Counselling and Wellbeing Service at Victoria University of Wellington and led the development of the project for Victoria to become a Health Promoting University. His most recent role as Associate Director, Student Counselling at Victoria included helping develop whole of University sexual violence prevention, safety and wellbeing strategies. 

Gerard spent ten years working for the NZ Department of Justice in probation, victim - offender mediation and in family and sexual violence treatment. He supported the development of Wellstop, (Community-based Sexual Violence treatment) and was appointed as the initial programme coordinator in 1993. Gerard is the current Clinical Advisory Board Chair for MOSAIC Wellington, a support service for sexually abused males, and provides training and restorative facilitation services for Benestar Employee Assistance Programme, Respect Ed Aotearoa- Sexual Harm Prevention organisation, and Victoria University of Wellington.

Gerard holds a BCA (Victoria NZ 1979- 1982); Post Grad Diploma in Social Work (Canterbury NZ 1991- 1992); Diploma Youth and Development (CYP- India - Chandigarh 1986-1987), Cert Drug and Alcohol Assessment (CIT NZ 1988), Cert Clinical Supervision (CIT NZ 1990). He is registered with the New Zealand Social Workers Registration Board and is a full member of the Aotearoa New Zealand Social Workers Association.