The leftward and other blatherings of Span (now with Snaps!)

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Dear New Zealand campaign launched

Received an email this morning about the Dear New Zealand campaign, a website aiming to prompt and collate letters from young NZers about their country.

The statement on their About Us page reads:

Our aim from getting you to write letters and for us to publish a book is to:
- Raise contentious issues in New Zealand
- Empower the voice of youth in New Zealand
- Ask serious questions of justice in our society
- Celebrate New Zealand’s society and cultural diversity
- Challenge the reader's thinking, leading to empowered action.
Your passion can influence our country.
The group organising all of this is called Speak Up, and appears to have grown out of the Future Leaders programme run by Excelerator, the NZ Leadership Institute*. The team appear to be mainly working in commerce-type jobs, however Oxfam and Greenpeace are listed as "partners" and any profits from the book will be donated to these two organisations and the Refugee Migrant Service.

Perhaps something many NZ pol bloggers may be interested in following up on, and maybe cross-posting their letters on their blogs?

PS, I should add that the deadline for submissions is Nov 30th.

* Kate, if you are reading this, is this the programme you were involved in?

2 comments:

Asher said...

This just seems like another "The youth need a voice, so we (as adults) will tell them what to do and where to do it, and that'll empower them!".

*sigh*

Kate Sutton said...

Hello,

Yep it is the course that I am involved in and I have helped these guys out a wee bit with getting judges etc. The course is finished now but these guys are pretty committed to it. They are all 25 and under I think majority about 20 years so its really about young people. The letters they have in so far are awesome, I am going to write one about how I found and believe in socialism its going to be great. Please do it the more diverse the letters the better. This group of organisers has a couple of commerce types and my beautiful friend Geoff who spends most of his life overseas working on aid work.