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Tandara Pa Rainbow is an international, community-led initiative working at the intersection of creativity, culture, psychosocial wellbeing, and collective care.
Welcome
Tandara Pa Rainbow is an international, community-led initiative that grew from Rainbow Muse and now operates across Australia and international contexts. Our work focuses on co-creating culturally grounded, relational, and creative psychosocial spaces that support individual and collective wellbeing, particularly in contexts shaped by displacement, structural violence, and systemic exclusion.
Our work is grounded in community partnership rather than service delivery alone. We work alongside communities to design and deliver programmes that centre creativity, cultural knowledge, relational safety, and collective care. This includes family-centred psychosocial programmes, community-based child and caregiver support, creative and arts-informed facilitation, and training approaches designed for local ownership beyond short-term project cycles.
Tandara Pa Rainbow works explicitly from an intersectional and decolonial framework. We centre the leadership, knowledge, and needs of First Nations peoples, Black communities, and People of Colour, and we prioritise accessibility and affirmation for LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent, and disabled communities. Our work recognises that wellbeing is inseparable from culture, land, community, and power, and that care must be shaped with, not for, the people it seeks to support.
We collaborate with community leaders, facilitators, artists, educators, and local organisations across diverse settings, including Australia, Africa, and refugee contexts. Our approach emphasises ethical partnership, cultural accountability, and sustainable ways of working, with a focus on strengthening local capacity and supporting community-defined pathways to wellbeing.
Tandara Pa Rainbow welcomes genuine allies who are prepared to listen, learn, and act with humility. Our spaces are led by the needs and voices of communities who have been marginalised or excluded by dominant systems. We ask those who join us to engage with care, responsibility, and a willingness to unlearn, recognising that collective care is both a shared practice and a long-term commitment.
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What does Tandara Mean?
Tandara (ta-nda-ra) is a verb in the Shona language of Zimbabwe, used across Karanga, Korekore, Manyika, and Zezuru dialects. While automated translations often reduce it to “hang out,” Tandara holds a much richer meaning. KuTandara means visiting, being with, spending time together, and belonging in community. It speaks to presence rather than productivity, relationship rather than transaction.
Growing up in Zimbabwe, my mother would take me to the homes of friends or family. When we arrived, people would ask, “Muruku tandara?” Are you going to stay? Are you going to be with us? If the answer was yes, I knew I would likely fall asleep in the car on the way home. Shoes off. Time unstructured. Held by the rhythms of the house.
To tandara is to know you are welcome. To arrive without having to perform, translate yourself, or earn your place. To be held in community. The word “Pa” means “on”. Tandara Pa Rainbow can be understood as gathering on the rainbow. The same rainbow that inspired Rainbow Muse, extended beyond therapy into community, culture, and collective life.
Rather than positioning professionals as experts delivering services, Tandara Pa Rainbow is grounded in coming together within community contexts. We co-create spaces where care, creativity, and culture are shared, and where people are not clients, but participants in collective wellbeing.
Tandara is a word from my people. It carries the meaning of being with, visiting, gathering, and spending time together in community. While Tandara Pa Rainbow was founded on Wurundjeri Country, the word itself is a visitor there, just as I am.
I am a settler on many of the lands where this work now takes place. Tandara Pa Rainbow operates across multiple countries and communities, each with their own histories, sovereignties, and relationships to land. This work is offered with respect for the Traditional Owners of all the lands on which Tandara Pa Rainbow operates, and with a commitment to honouring Indigenous sovereignty, knowledge, and ongoing connection to land.
With this as our starting point, Tandara is not fixed to one language or culture. It is an invitation rather than a definition. We welcome other cultures to bring their own words, gestures, and ways of naming togetherness, care, and connection. When we gather as our full selves, carrying different histories, responsibilities, and relationships to place, and when we acknowledge both past and present, we create the conditions for different futures.
How did we get here ?
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I am Chenai, and in 2019 I founded Rainbow Muse after more than a decade working in mental health and community settings. I was searching for ways of supporting wellbeing that did not rely on diagnosis, hierarchy, or fitting people into narrow boxes. I wanted spaces that were creative, relational, and shaped by the people inside them. That search led to Rainbow Muse, and eventually to something beyond it.
In 2022, I joined forces with my close friend Sammy Elliott, founder of Girl and Dog Psychology, and together we opened Rainbow Muse Clinic. The work grew quickly. The demand was immense. Within months, our waitlists were overflowing and our doors were closed to new referrals. Sitting in the clinic, watching people turned away by systems that were already overstretched, I felt the limits of the clinical model sharply. Even with the best intentions, it was not a structure that could meet the depth or scale of what communities were asking for.
At the same time, my work in community development, creative practice, and international contexts kept pointing me back to something older and more durable than services. Community. Togetherness. Shared meaning. Spaces where people make, move, talk, sit, grieve, and belong together.
Tandara Pa Rainbow emerged from that tension. A shift away from clinic-based care and toward community-led, creative, and relational ways of supporting wellbeing. A space rooted in art making, culture, collective care, and social justice. A way of working that prioritises togetherness over throughput, and connection over compliance.
At the heart of Tandara is my mother, Eunice. She taught me what it means to tandara. To visit. To be with. To belong. To arrive somewhere knowing you are welcome, that you can take off your shoes, that you will be held by the people around you. Growing up, tandara was not an intervention or a program. It was how community lived. How care moved. How people showed up for one another.
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When my mother passed away in February 2022, my world broke open. Tandara became a way of carrying her forward. Of honouring what she taught me about love, generosity, and being human together. Everything Tandara Pa Rainbow holds comes from that inheritance.
Tandara Pa Rainbow grew from a long arc of work, grief, love, and community practice.
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Today, Tandara Pa Rainbow operates across Australia and international contexts, working alongside communities through creative psychosocial programs, arts-based facilitation, family and caregiver support, and capacity-building approaches designed for local ownership. It is not a replacement for therapy, and it is not a service pipeline. It is a community practice shaped by culture, history, grief, and imagination.
As Rainbow Muse Clinic emerged into Rainbow Muse Collective, Tandara continues as a living expression of what remains when we choose community over systems, relationship over hierarchy, and care that grows outward rather than inward. Tandara exists because my mother existed. And because community always has.
What do we do?
Tandara Pa Rainbow focuses on co-creating creative, community-led programs, projects, and initiatives shaped by the people and places we work alongside. Our work centres social inclusion, collective care, and psychosocial wellbeing, with creativity and culture as core pathways rather than add-ons. While Rainbow Muse Collective focuses on therapy and clinical practice within Australia, Tandara exists beyond the clinic. Tandara works at a community level, supporting connection, meaning-making, and collective resilience in contexts shaped by displacement, structural violence, marginalisation, and social change.
All Tandara work is grounded in culturally responsive, trauma-aware, and ethically accountable practice. We draw on evidence-informed approaches while remaining adaptive to local knowledge, community leadership, and context. Safety, consent, and relational accountability are central, not assumed. Our offerings are diverse and flexible, and may include facilitated community programs, trainings, workshops, and longer-term project partnerships. These often involve creative and arts-based processes, movement, storytelling, peer-led spaces, cross-cultural exchange, and collective reflection. Food, nature, ritual, and shared making are often part of how connection is built and sustained.
We work alongside community leaders, artists, facilitators, educators, and local organisations to design initiatives that can be held, adapted, and continued beyond short-term involvement. Where appropriate, we support capacity building, facilitator training, and knowledge sharing to strengthen local ownership and continuity. Tandara Pa Rainbow is committed to work that is relational rather than extractive, collaborative rather than prescriptive, and grounded in respect for land, culture, and lived experience. We approach this work with humility, care, and a deep belief in the power of communities to shape their own pathways to wellbeing. We’re grateful to walk this journey with others, and to keep learning how collective care can take shape across different places, cultures, and futures.
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Tandara Pa Rainbow acknowledges the Bunurong/Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Peoples of the Kulin Nation, on whose lands we tandara. We are committed to allyship and are guided by the leadership and self-determination of First Nations Peoples. We honour connection to land, culture and community of the traditional custodians of this land, and offer respect to Elders past, present and emerging. Sovereignty has never been ceded and this always was and always will be Aboriginal Land. We are committed to ongoing practices of decolonisation that centre the experiences of the people of this land.
Tandara Pa Rainbow is an anti-racist, anti-discrimination, anti-ableism, anti-stigma and anti-oppression space. We make no assumptions about people based on what we see at face value, we don’t label others, but we happily embrace and respect the labels people choose, see value in and find important.
We welcome you with our whole hearts.
