Thank you!
Kia ora e hoa mā,
It’s been a while since I popped my unshaven face up for a kōrero. That’s been intentional as I wanted to create as much space as possible for our rangatahi to have more conversations with you as they became more confident in their leadership roles in our kaupapa. But I do want to thank you and to share my reflections on a few things this year with you, part of our amazing Shoebox Christmas team.
Firstly, a huuuuge thank you. Whatever part you played. If you gave a koha to a child in one of the communities we work with - you told them we’re all in this together, if you were unable to take part but told a friend or somebody else - you helped spread the word, if you weren’t able to take part and gave us feedback on what stopped you - you helped us make the kaupapa work better next year, so e kore ngā mimiti o te mihi - there is no end to our thanks!
Secondly, a huge mihi to our rangatahi kāhui - our collective of young people who have been learning and working alongside Sam, Lisa and me to steer this waka for all of us.
Arita, Jayden, Vyaan, Uru, Telson, Tiara, and our new friends Karnia and Maia: I’ve already said it, but e poho kēreru ana au - I’m proud of you, and proud to do this mahi alongside you.
I’ve been working on this longer-term plan of de-centralising the kaupapa for the last few years, and nearly every one of those years, I’ve said something like “I need to, cause geez, if I get sick in November, it’s going to be pretty tricky…”. This year, I did get sick in the final 2 weeks of our kaupapa, with a hefty dose of Covid in December.
I’d like to thank the tūpuna or whoever it was who made sure that the one year that kōrero comes true, happens to be the year we have this amazing group of rangatahi on board, holding the rudder steady.
Here are a few of our favourite mihi/acknowledgements from the schools and services that received koha through the kaupapa this year:
My reflections.
Our rangatahi leadership kaupapa
For most of the year I’ve been taking 8 rangatahi (young people) through a leadership programme where we focus on the skills they will apply next in the kaupapa, and working with them to embed those skills as they lead Shoebox Christmas in their rohe/region. We probably have talked about this enough considering how big a change it was to our kaupapa, but that came up in our retrospective this week, and we’ll do that differently next year.
Highlights
Easily the biggest highlight for me has been seeing the progress of the rangatahi I’ve been privileged to work alongside. Watching them continue to step into their tupunatanga like Vy said, as well as their confidence and knowledge, and seeing them find loved-mahi, has been a pleasure and a gift. Together, nearly all the team have found types of work within the kaupapa that they’ve done for the first time and loved. From comms, user research, user experience design, wānanga design, data-design to story-telling and more, if nothing else - them knowing this is work they can do and are good at, has made this a year worth spending. It also absolutely makes it worth figuring out how to do this better and more effectively next year. 2021 was a pilot for the concept. This year we tested and refined the content and operation. Next year we’ll do the same again.
Working alongside them in general has been a highlight. Our amazing constellation of rangatahi is made up of young people aged 16 - 23, so it’s an entirely different thing to coaching and working with adults. Different challenges, and different moments of magic.
And with your help, our rangatahi see and understand the part they’ve played in creating positive experiences and moments of aroha for over 16,000 tamariki and their whānau across Aotearoa was a highlight. I don’t like measuring this in monetary value but while looking at how much we’d spent in koha to schools and services so they could rush out and collect the 3-5 koha which gifters didn’t deliver in time, we had to put the dollar value there. We gave koha of around $3500 cash directly to schools and services to which sounds like a lot. But with Arita, we worked out that the total value of aroha being gifted from within our communites is at least $810,000. As a percentage, that direct cash koha isn’t much. And the highlight of these 6 rangatahi leading and facilitating that much support being given across the motu is another highlight. Not because of the dollars, but because that’s an easy reference for them to understand, reference, and take pride in.
More importantly though, because of our collective working together, each of those whānau and tamariki know we’ve got their back. On the other side of that koha cycle is a whole lot of whānau (you as a gifter) who connected with their community through the act of giving. Our rangatahi helping facilitate that connection has been another highlight for me.
Challenges and learnings
I’ve led this kaupapa across most of the motu for 9 years now and this year was easily the most challenging so far. No other year has come close.
And I mean it was harder for everyone: our gifter community, schools and services, and our kāhui rangatahi (collective of young people), leading the kaupapa in their areas.
The cost-of-living crisis, and the other challenges we’ve all faced this year meant it was A LOT harder to find gifters in many of our rohe/regions. Luckily, the likes of Vy, Jayden, and Uru in charge of our comms have brilliant minds for design and used our social media much better than I ever have, and found ways to reach those who could help.
The financial challenges also meant we had a huge increase in the number of whānau approaching us directly from the community for help. We weren’t set up to do this, so our rangatahi decided on a best-we-can-do-now approach, and we’ll improve on this next year.
Staff shortages also meant a lot of the schools and services we support found it hard to get their part of the mahi done (we have a plan to help with this next year).
My time went increasingly towards preparing our rangatahi for each stage of the process and towards their 1:1 coaching. The coaching alone ended up taking one full weekday, so I had less and less time to help with the operational side of things either in the rohe/regions our rangatahi were leading or the remaining areas around the motu. This was probably the most important learning (ie. this kaupapa needs more time to do it justice).
The overheads that come along with running the kaupapa as a charity actually add to these (finding funding, reporting etc, is often a full-time job in itself).
There were A LOT of learnings in the rangatahi development kaupapa in particular, I’ll write another novel about that later but a big one was getting the balance right between making space for our young people to learn while still maintaining the experience for our gifters.
Ie. trying to maintain two of our guiding principles of aroha and manaakitanga in the experience we create for our gifter community, while at the same time letting each of the crew make their mistakes in the safest possible way, and helping them with the learning that comes from that. This on-the-job learning is a central part of the kaupapa as we take our theoretical learning from wānanga and apply them to the way we work.
As with anything you’re doing for the first time (there is no blueprint for rangatahi development in the context of Shoebox Christmas while emphasizing pride in cultural values and identity), there’s no 101, it’s a continual adjustment back and forth, feeling and interpreting where they’re at, and responding to it.
Where to from here?
Like I said, I’ll write more about what we’ve learned as a kaupapa. I’ll post those kōrero in this section, so subscribe to this newsletter if you’re interested in hearing more about that.
I’m taking a break now and focusing on the most important job I have - being a dad to Kāhu and Huhana in this crazy world they’re growing up so quickly in. I started working on this kaupapa in 2014, the same year Huhana was born, and Kāhu started school this year. So for the entirety of their lives, I’ve spent the second half of every year not sleeping enough, and not giving them as much time as I want to. Balancing that time for them, with what I think is important role modelling of how we’re all responsible for contributing back into the community, iwi, or other collective we benefit from, is just as much of a week-by-week exercise in testing and learning as our rangatahi development kaupapa has been. I just hope I get it as close to useful for them and everyone else as I can, and that I’m using my time here to be a good ancestor, father, and descendant. Those three things take juggling.
But for the next couple of weeks at least, Shoebox Christmas and all the other kaupapa go on pause as I spend time with whānau. I hope you get to do the same, beside people you care about.
Meri Kirihimete, Ngā mihi o te tau hou Pākehā - Merry Christmas, and a happy new year!
Pera
Thank you Pera and the rangatahi for your mahi, you are growing future leaders and the tamariki in our communities know someone thought of them. I hope you enjoy time with your whanau. This is my first time gifting and I look forward to doing it again.