Kia ora!
For those of us in school holiday mode (and this is a reminder for me too) - enjoy them! There will be a time when the ability to spend dedicated hours or days with the most important little people in your life will be something you look back on and cherish. Don’t let those moments be taken over by work, meetings, or general busyness you won’t remember in 2 months’ time!
It’s all go for our Shoebox Christmas whānau right now.
Our amazing schools and community organisations have nearly finished getting their details to us, and our rangatahi leaders are about to start setting up the website ready for you to join :) In the meantime, I wanted to share a quick update.
Firstly, we’re planning on opening sign-ups either late this week or early next week.
We’ll be using our new platform this year, which brings with it changes that many of you asked for. I wanted to share two of those big changes today.
Each school, education centre, or community service will have its own ‘project’ on the platform which you can sign up for.
This means you can sign up specifically to help those groups you care most about, and add/reduce koha for a particular school or organisation etc. Previously if you wanted to help across different regions, or lend a hand with stationery starter packs, pamper packs for mums at Women’s Refuge Centres or other kaupapa, we had to make workarounds for this and it took a lot of time. This way you can help out where and when you want.
It also means we can support the schools, services and groups in the way that works best for them.
Previously, we needed to make all the schools and services fit into a ‘one approach for all’ model, with dates, guidelines etc. As more and more organisations joined the kaupapa, this didn’t work well for those organisations we’re here to help. Eg. having a koha drop off deadline for a Women’s Refuge centre based on schools closing dates made things harder for them and for you (and what’s harder for you, is harder for us!)
Our new platform means each school, service or group will have their own drop-off dates which you will be able to see clearly - but remember if you have friends or whānau delivering to other schools or services, they might have different drop off dates!
Hear quickly and automatically when a school or service you care about, needs more help.
If a school or service already has enough gifters matched with their tamariki, you’ll be able to sign up to be notified if they need more help.
In previous years its taken A LOT of work to try and find gifters at the end of the year for specific schools where not all of the koha have arrived. This little toggle/button should make this easier as well as make it easier for you to help locally!
It also means we can start setting projects up now for schools and organisations who haven’t finished getting their details to us. That means you can view those projects and click ‘Notify me’. That way you’ll hear about it as soon as that project has tamariki ready to be matched - you won’t need to rely on us to remember, and reach out to let you know :)
What happens next?
If you’re signed up for the newsletter (ie. you heard about this through your inbox), we’ll email you again with the link as soon as projects are ready on the platform. If you see a project that is running this year but isn’t ready for you to be matched with tamariki yet, just click Notify and we’ll email you automatically.
If the project is ready, you’ll be able to click Join!
Our rangatahi leaders will be there to help when needed, but as always, the Facebook groups will have people there ready to help as well - they’ll be linked to directly from the projects you join :)
Have an awesome week,
Pera and the Shoebox Christmas whānau!