Please check your drop off date
Yes it is! Koha drop off time!
There were tamariki playing sports in the playground and others singing waiata in a room close by. If my gift brings even a fraction of the joy I felt hearing and seeing the tamariki I will feel blessed.
- Gifter dropping off their koha
Kia ora e hoa,
This is the part of the year when our organisers and I, our schools and social services start sweating just a bit more than the December heat already forces. We’re worrying about which koha won’t turn up. Every year, there are gifters up and down the country who had every intention of getting their beautiful gift delivered before the last day, but those unplanned things* keep happening, and they end up missing the date. This means we have to try and find an emergency back-up gift. Please don’t leave yours till the last minute.
Please check the dates in your project summary here:
If you’ve already dropped yours off, thank you! We’d love to hear about your experience taking part. If you have 30 seconds, please let us know here.
*Things include: family sickness, car trouble, unexpected work trips etc. All those things out of our control!
Projects still looking for gifters
We have a small number of schools and services still looking for gifters to make Christmas special for our tamariki in:
Ōtautahi
Palmerston North
Dannevirke
Masterton
Auckland
You can view them here:
Parents reaching out directly for help
If you’re in the Facebook Group, you’ll have noticed that more parents are reaching out directly to us asking for help with their children this year. You’ll also know we’re not set up to work directly with whānau in a safe way that protects the dignity of both sides of the koha exchange - we work alongside schools and social services already connected to those whānau.
But our purpose is more important than our process, and “that’s not how we do things” is never an excuse to avoid doing the right thing. I’ve heard “that’s just the policy” get in the way of way too many good outcomes in my paid jobs, and that’s not a thing* here. So I had to think quite hard about what we do in these situations.
How we handle these cries for help warrants more than a couple of paragraphs in text where tone is open to interpretation, so after sense checking my thinking with our rangatahi and others, I’ve put it on our kōrero hub over here:
If you missed out on joining a project this year, the kōrero above gives an opportunity to help - but I wanted to explain it properly, hence the resource in our hub.
Again, e hoa (friend), thank you for being part of our team. Now more than ever, I think aroha and kotahitanga (unity, collective action) can be an antidote to the division and challenges so many of us are facing or feeling, directly or indirectly in Aotearoa right now. But it takes all of us, and it takes connection. Thank you for being a part of this community.
Ngā manaakitanga,
Pera