Wendy Harper

For Wendy Harper, sustainability doesn’t start with frameworks or policies — it starts within. As the founder of the Agency of Women, her life’s work centres on building the inner capacities needed for real-world peace, collaboration, and long-term sustainability.

Wendy’s perspective was shaped early. Training as a nurse, she encountered death and dying at just seventeen, an experience that led her to decide “to live my life as a learning experience.” What stayed with her most were not material regrets, but the emotional ones — the ways people wished they had loved, shown up, or lived differently. That insight now underpins her work with leaders who appear externally successful but remain internally fragmented.

Through the Agency of Women, Wendy focuses on what she sees as the missing link in systems transformation: mindset. She believes that peace and sustainability become possible only when individuals develop the inner stamina, self-awareness, and collaborative capacity required to lead change well. As she puts it, “Being the difference that ‘Makes THE Difference’ to making a difference.”

Her work draws deeply on Indigenous wisdom and lived experience, including lessons from First Nations communities that remind us there is no separation between people and the Earth. Leadership, in Wendy’s view, is contextual — sometimes we lead, sometimes we support — and both are essential to collective success.

At its heart, the Agency of Women exists to help people reconnect their personal growth with collective impact. Wendy’s invitation is simple but profound: imagine the life you would want to look back on — and have the courage to live it now.

Read Wendy’s full Blooming Sustainability to explore the inner work behind lasting systems change.

BLOOMING  Sustainability Questionnaire

Name: Wendy Harper

Company & Title: Agency of Women

Website & LinkedIn Profile: https://agencyofwomen.org / https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendy-harper-44a8395/

* Guiding Values | Kaupapa

If sustainability were a flower blooming in your life, what would it look like? What nurtures it?

If sustainability were a flower blooming in my life, I would be ‘being the flower’! I am all about growing more Love in the world through the capacity-building essential to achieving real-world peace and sustainability. Functionally bridging these domains depends on accessing one of the greatest (and most under-utilised) reserve resources we have: the development of our innate ‘inner’ capacities. This is the awesome domain of ‘mindset’, and mindset development, integrated into project-based learning, is the critical ‘secret sauce’ of systems transformation.

A quote, personal motto or whakataukī that reflects your vision:

One of my personal mottoes is: “Being the difference that ‘Makes THE Difference’ to making a difference.”

This motto sprung up for me in my formative years observing that many people, over many generations, had championed the vision of a better, safer world for all. Something was ‘missing’. What was this paradigm-shifting ‘missing’ link that kept lasting ‘peace and sustainability’ so seemingly perpetually out of reach?

Identifying this missing piece, for lifting the glass ceiling on our progress, became an intriguing core focus for my field research. My life as a ‘guinea pig’ in this decades-long discovery process was not for the faint-hearted, but the Agency of Women has emerged as the real-world pilot project evidencing the logic model and making the shorthand for transformation available to those leading the field.

If you could mentor a rising change-maker in Aotearoa, what advice would you share?

I would encourage them to tune into what calls them. If they feel purpose-driven to be a change-maker, the only way to find out if we can be such a champion, is to go for it 100%. Having a goal to ‘master the art' of change-leadership, through collaborative endeavours that stretch our growth, is what makes transformation not only possible, in practice, but inevitable. Committing two years to intentionally embed the shorthand for transformation, at a foundational level, is the change-leadership work we will never have to do again.

* Leading Change | Arataki

A key moment in your journey that shaped your path:

I cut my transformation-teeth on ‘death and dying’ as an old-school trainee nurse. At 17½ years old, after a particularly harrowing passing, I had an epiphany. I decided “to live my life as a learning experience. I was here to learn and it doesn’t matter whether it feels good, or not.” Those last nine words proved to be the most critical to my progress.

The dying I nursed never mentioned regrets over dream cars or holidays; they only regretted the ways in which they had behaved and failed to show how much their loved ones meant to them. By the time they realised these things, it was generally too late to make any kind of real difference. I now work with leaders to resolve these existential fragments now, ensuring their external success is matched by internal completion before it becomes a statistic in the ledger of end-of-life regrets.

What’s the main challenge you face in driving sustainability within your sector?

The “Success Trap” is deeply entrenched. I work with change-leaders who are technically brilliant and academically credentialed but, to whatever degree, existentially fragmented. Continuing to take action through this fragmentation unnecessarily limits our impact-capacity for systems transformation. 

Transformation emerges through a shift in perspective - a kizuki - that incentivises the effort required to develop the mindsets and stamina for gestating, delivering, and developing a new possibility into a fully realised, real-world outcome. My role is to provide the shorthand and the "generics" required to strategically navigate this shift.

An area you need more support with:

In general, raising the ‘glass ceiling’ of our collective capacity for peace and sustainability can only be achieved by developing our individual capacities for cooperation and collaboration. With no time to waste, we need to be out there, like the ‘Special Agents’ we are, every day, in every way possible, to help as many people as possible, kickstart the process of playing their part. To provide them with ready-made pathways, the Agency of Women offers those focussed on systems transformation the opportunity to hone their Olympic level collaborative skills through impact delivery.

An Indigenous perspective you admire and want people to be mindful of:

We made a film about the future of peace and sustainability called “Think About It!”. Uncle David Gulpilil lived with us through the making. The film needed something special from Dave but the 'two worlds' chemistry was making this a tough ask for him.

So Dave and I headed into the studio together. Me being a facilitator, rather than a director, we quietly tuned-in to one another until Dave felt the wavelength the film needed from him. Unscripted, he danced himself into the words of his mother tongue which, at the end, he repeated in English; “My Mother”. The ‘mother’ he was referring was ‘Mother Earth’. It was the perfect closing scene for the body of the film.

For all of us living a domesticated life, distanced from the existential reality of being a creature of this natural world, it’s easy to feel separate from our relationship with Earth. In reality, Earth is our all-giving mother, floating in the only goldilocks zone we could survive.  Nature, the cosmos, is us. There is no separation.

Another first nations Love-jolt I love adding to help prime the decision-making process is "what would the babies say?”. It’s a great thought provoking leveller.

Your best approach for engaging stakeholders in meaningful dialogue about ESG:

My best approach is having my own transformation goal deeply embedded within myself. I prefer to openly explore and then synthesise my understanding of the stakeholder needs based on the pain points they identify and the scope of their ESG aspirations.

Meeting people / stakeholders where they are, and matching needs to resources, is essential to their next phase of sustainable development. I’m asking myself “who are the best people, with the best resources, who can help them meet their needs, at this point”? Collaborating as part of an eco-system of diverse, road-tested practitioners means the stakeholder is being genuinely guided to the right people, with the best mix of the trans-disciplinary resources they’ll need, for the journey ahead.

Leading with data that a) outlines the direct fiscal benefits of the proposed strategy as well as b) the ESG benefits they will gain across all domains of business wellbeing, provides the stakeholder what they’ll need to (internally) justify their decision.

What do you think is Aotearoa’s superpower in creating a sustainable future?

From limited understanding, I feel Aotearoa has the potential to provide a facilitatory lead for the Oceania region as a hub for research and community-building around decolonisation and the integration of ancestral wisdom into systems transformation processes - especially in association with the ‘Inner Development Goals (IDG)’.

* Surfing the Green Wave | Kakariki

Books, podcasts, courses or other resources that profoundly shaped your approach:

I am my own guinea pig. By immersively conducting field research using the organically emerging 'stuff of life' as stimulus, I allow everything in the field to have meaning. While I have gleaned from countless sources—nature, indigenous wisdoms, films, and books - the most profound learning came from taking this into the remarkable, unknown territories of deep, transformative relationship. I now offer the shorthand gained from these territories to those I guide, providing a direct route to wholeness that bypasses decades of trial and error.

Events in Aotearoa or globally that you think are must-attend:

Questing for meaning is the only way to find our own path. We need to be willing to gamble our finite time on the experiences that call to us. And going where we feel called, is honouring the trust we have in ourselves. To whatever we feel called, I say go!

If you want your travel to benefit first nations communities, you can also join AOW’s immersive cultural retreats with the women of Vanuatu. These are dedicated especially for ‘change-leadership development’ as well as relationship retreats for ‘mothers and daughters’ and all financially support AOW and Mitingar. As well as these "impact adventures”, you are most welcome to reach out for 1:1 guiding, bespoke mentoring, gamified workshops, and structured immersive’s, all designed to embed the inner / outer shorthand to streamline both personal and organisational sustainability journeys.

A sustainable initiative or project in Aotearoa that deserves more attention:

The lessons learned by first nations about living sustainably from appreciating the land would be awesome learning for everyone to help reconnect with themselves as part of the natural cycle of life.

If your work could plant one seed of change for the future, what would it be?

Connecting the individual pursuit of the ‘phenomenal’ to big stretch projects for impact combines pure self-interest with collective wellbeing. The ‘phenomenal’ aspect is super provocative and provides the intrinsic motivation to lean into the growth mindset level of making impact happen in, real-time with inner-development breakthroughs, which combines to build the social infrastructure for enabling People, Planet, and Profit to thrive. For me, it’s the most exciting, alchemic adventure of a lifetime!

The leader(s) you endorse for a future edition of Blooming Sustainability:

Mary Jack, a Vanuatu elder leading ‘Mitingar’. The Agency of Women partnered with Mary to establish Mitingar as a registered not-for-profit to advocate for grassroots women. We are currently inviting patrons and partners to donate and be part of this extraordinary, legacy-building story.

* One actionable takeaway for our readers to make a change today for a brighter tomorrow:

Imagine being at the end of your life, looking back. What kind of life would you have liked to have lived? This is the adventure of your lifetime—go for it! There’s no guarantees and no dress rehearsals. This is it. We have to be willing to gamble the most precious currency we have to embark on the journey. Time.

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