Brrrr brrrr
That's the sound of the fr-eeze.
Kia ora e hoa,
Ho-ly mo-ly it’s cold.
Anyway, what’s been going on….
Shoebox Christmas updates
Our rangatahi (youth) values-based-leadership course is going through the NZQA prep process over at Te Wānanga o Raukawa at the moment. When that’s out in the world it will mean the rangatahi we coach and support to lead their own Shoebox Christmas projects across Aotearoa will have a school-record credential as well as real-world leadership experience.
That’s a whole lot of excitement, awesome-ness and work, summarised in one sentence, but you can hear a little bit more about it from the rangatahi themselves:
With Vyaan’s amazing people weaving and leadership, we’ve been catching up with young leaders across the country to explain this opportunity. Through the course, rangatahi learn leadership fundamentals while lending their magic to the collective aroha of Shoebox Christmas.
If you know any rangatahi who would be interested in leading their own Shoebox Christmas project, supported by myself and our experienced rangatahi while learning leadership fundamentals - ask them to register here:
Also please let me know if you’d like us to catch up with rangatahi in your neck of the woods to share what we’ve been doing. This is impactful kōrero we love having. (I say we, but most importantly this is about rangatahi who have been involved, sharing the outcomes and what they got out of it). Just email us at support@shoeboxchristmas.co.nz (safer bet than replying to this newsletter since that turns into a 60-email-long thread in my inbox!)
What about sign-ups?
We’ve been reaching out to our partner schools and social services and getting them set up with everything they need. Arita is leading this part of the process along with refining how we capture, hold, and care for that data.
If you’re a school or service and missed the last email, get in touch here.
Gifters, we’ll let you know firstly through this newsletter when signups are open in our different rohe/regions, and of course on our Instagram page, and the local Facebook pages/groups too.
Other kaupapa?
Pirihira has been leading a piece of food security work on Koha Tree. She’s aiming to make it easier to redistribute excess kai from where it’s not needed in a community, to the organisations who can get it to where it’s most needed. This is in response to a challenge we had from matua Mike Smith about using Koha Tree to help address food insecurity.
Last week we spent some time with the kaimahi (staff) at the Te Umu ki Rangituhi - the social supermarket Ngāti Toa built to support whānau in and around Porirua. If you don’t know what they do, you can read more about it here.
Koha Tree will connect cafes and restaurants with this amazing organisation and others, and depending on how that goes, we’ll look at doing the same for individuals, whānau and households.
Along with the design kōrero we had with the whānau at Te Umu ki Rangituhi, we also had lots of laughs and a few nearly-tears. We spoke about empathy and how/why it seems to be so high in some, and so low in others, and reflected on how we can help those who have never spent time with people different from themselves, so haven’t had the opportunity to build that important muscle of empathy.
As a parent of a 9-year-old and 6-year-old, this is always on my mind and of course Shoebox Christmas is one of the ways we try to make this easier for parents.
Let us know in the comments what you do to help children or adults grow their empathy for others.
Stay tuned for more on the food security kaupapa!
Koha Tree work
Aside from adding new ways to support our communities like the above, there’s always a lot of work to do on Koha Tree, bugs that need fixing, and improvements to make it easy to share, give koha, and connect with your community (that’s the reason Koha Tree exists!). We’ve been spending some time lately on how we showcase the rangatahi looking after the projects as well as making it easier for them to manage the projects and kaupapa they look after.
We’re also building a place for updates on projects so organisers can quickly and easily share things that are not quite urgent enough for an email, other project types like the kai redistribution kaupapa, and creating a place for rangatahi to send bulk emails to the gifters taking part in their kaupapa.
Obviously, all these pieces of work take time and money, and while I happily donate my time to this kaupapa and community of ours, that’s not something I can ask for repeatedly from our developers. We can only build and fix what we can pay for. If you’d like give a boost to what we can pay for, our Givealittle is below. We’d like to (at least) keep the bugs to a minimum as we kick into this year’s Shoebox Christmas period :)
I’ll be in touch again soon as we start getting closer to sign ups :)
Ngā manaakitanga,
Pera
PS I know I haven’t talked about any of the madness going on in the world at the moment. Writing is how I respond when I’m not quite sure how to act on specific injustices on insanity. It takes breath and time - neither of which I’ve been able to catch much of lately. As some of the responses above pick up their own momentum and life, I’m sure I’ll attack the keyboard again. Till then.