About Crisis Bunker
We help communities prepare to look after their own. Especially the ones left to do it alone.
Resourcing and standing alongside marae, hapū and rural communities so they can lead their own response when help is hours, or days, away.
What we are
Enablers, not experts
Crisis Bunker was built in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle, after watching communities face 72-plus hours alone before formal help arrived.
Plenty of organisations will tell a community what it needs. We start from the opposite place. The people who live somewhere already understand their own risks, their own land, and their own whānau better than any outsider ever will.
Our job is to put capability into their hands, not to hold it ourselves. We bring the equipment, the systems, and the practical know-how. The community brings the local knowledge and the leadership. Together that produces preparedness that actually works on the day, because the people using it helped build it.
We measure success by what a community can do without us, not by how much they rely on us.
What we do
Four ways we build capability
Resource
Resilience Hubs, survival backpacks and response equipment, specified around what each community will actually face.
Train
Hands-on training so local people know how to activate, run and maintain their own response, no outside help required.
Plan together
Co-designed preparedness plans built around the community's geography, people and existing strengths.
Stay alongside
Ongoing support, funding help and follow-up so preparedness stays current long after the gear arrives.
Where we go
Where we're most needed, not where it's easiest
The communities most exposed in a disaster are often the hardest to reach: rural, coastal, and isolated places where the road washes out, the power stays off longest, and formal help arrives last, if at all.
Those are exactly the places we focus on. We go where the need is greatest, not where the logistics are simplest. It would be easier to chase the big, accessible, well-connected centres. But the whole point of preparedness is to protect the people who can't count on anyone else getting to them in time.
Working with marae
We start by listening, because that's what's usually been missing
When Cyclone Gabrielle hit, it was marae in Tairāwhiti, the East Coast, Northland and beyond that became the emergency hub for communities cut off for weeks, running on whatever resources they had. That is not new. Marae have carried that responsibility for generations, usually without being resourced or even asked.
For too long, marae have been told what they need by people who never sat down with them. We work the other way around. Every relationship starts with kōrero and a willingness to listen before we suggest anything at all.
We come to listen first. The plan belongs to the community, and we help them build it.
We want to understand the real picture: where the water comes from, which roads cut off first, how many kaumātua cannot evacuate on their own, what has already been tried. That understanding shapes everything. Tikanga guides how we work on site, how equipment is stored and accessed, and how training is run. That is not a courtesy we extend. It is the foundation we build on.
First
Kōrero before anything else
We sit down with kaumātua and whānau to understand the community's risks, needs and strengths before recommending a single thing.
Then
Co-design the solution
Equipment, hub placement and access are shaped by the community. We bring the options, they make the calls.
Next
Install with mana intact
How gear is stored, who holds the keys, how it is activated, all of it reflects the community's tikanga and values.
Always
Stay in the relationship
We do not hand over and vanish. Training, follow-up and further support continues well beyond install day.
Who is behind it
Built on experience that has been tested under pressure
Hamish Coulter
Founder, Crisis Bunker · Ngāti Porou, Tainui, Maniapoto
Hamish founded Crisis Bunker after building and scaling large businesses across competitive markets, the kind of work that only succeeds if you can build systems that hold up when the pressure is on and the stakes are real.
Since then he has built a strong team across every part of the business, from logistics and deployment through to funding and outreach. The one part he keeps for himself is the relationships. Hamish stays at the front of every community partnership, because trust with marae and community leaders is built in person, kanohi ki te kanohi.
As Ngāti Porou, with whakapapa to Tainui and Maniapoto, that way of working is not a strategy. It reflects an understanding of how relationships are built and honoured in te ao Māori: with patience, respect, and a willingness to listen long before you speak.
That combination, commercial rigour and a genuine commitment to community, is what Crisis Bunker is built on. Not expertise handed down, but capability built up, together.
Who we are
Based in the Bay of Plenty, working across Aotearoa
Crisis Bunker is owned and operated by New Zealanders, based in Papamoa in the Bay of Plenty. Behind the brand is a passionate, hands-on team that holds its own stock, builds and brands its own hubs, and dispatches the length of the country including rural and isolated communities others find hard to reach.
We work alongside CDEM groups, local councils and Civil Defence to make sure community preparedness connects into the formal response network, not around it.
Based
Papamoa, Bay of Plenty
Ownership
New Zealand owned and operated
Reach
Nationwide delivery and install
The track record
What we have helped communities build
50+
Resilience Hubs installed
317
Marae and community partnerships
57
Agencies and schools equipped
1,000s
Families prepared nationwide
Want to talk about your community's preparedness?
