Andre is Samoan (villages: Afega, Fasito‘otai) and was born in Lower Hutt , Aotearoa New Zealand. For over two decades, he has worked across government, community, youth, public health, education sectors in Australia and New Zealand. This includes 11 years as a Pastor in both Macquarie Fields, NSW, and Wellington, NZ. He has been nominated for awards such as Australia Day Citizen of the Year, for his local council awards, and NSW Pacific Community Worker of the Year.

His professional experience notably includes holding various senior roles at Te Kahui Tika Tangata New Zealand Human Rights Commission. Notably, he worked on many social cohesion and anti-racism campaigns, and has advised nine different Human Rights Commissioners.

At the end of 2019, at a time of intense homophobic debate, he came out publicly as gay, in a viral opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald that was also published in The Age (Melbourne), Stuff (NZ), and the Samoa Observer.

His lived experience of being a church Pastor, and a survivor of conversion practices would become invaluable to his human rights work. He worked on the Ministry of Justice team that developed the policy for the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Act before New Zealand’s Parliament passed it into law. And, he was subsequently appointed the senior manager overseeing the establishment of the Human Rights Commission’s civil redress scheme.

This has been one of many full circle moments for Andre — where he was able to applied his lived experience, to help inform policy development and design systems and processes, that would eventually help improve services and minimise negative outcomes for lived experience groups.

He also had secondments at the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet working on Unite Against COVID-19, and worked at Te Hiringa Hauora | Health Promotion Agency on many award winning public health campaigns.

In 2022, Stuff did a National Portrait Piece (feature story) about him that appeared in appears in their nine daily newspapers across Aotearoa.

He serves as a Board member/Trustee for two national youth development and community organisations - Zeal, and Praxis.

Since 2021, he has been a Judge for the prestigious BEST Design Awards Social Good Category, and in 2024, he joined the Diversity Awards as a judge in the Respectful Culture category.