LAUSR

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 2020 vol. 44 no. 6 © 2020 The Authors This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. Conventional approaches to health promotion often exclude our most marginalised populations.1 This can be traced to a lack of trust of those who are conveying the particular message or call to action, a lack of resonance with the prioritisation of the particular message, different cultural priorities and understandings of key issues, and – above all – a lack of self-determination surrounding the population’s determinants of health. In this sense, the marginalised population lacks agency in identifying their own priorities and the various ways that such determinants might be addressed. This commentary draws on the lived realities of criminal gang members and their whānau (wider family)2 as a means of highlighting the need for us to think differently about our approaches to health promotion. It is noteworthy that this discussion is equally relevant to a host of populations that exist external to dominant western discourses.