Challenge 2000 held a Youth Week event on Friday 5th June 2015 at the Johnsonville Community Centre. This event was called Tomorrow’s Dream – Manawa Ora O Apopo and was facilitated by our Youth Committee. Around 20 young people from around the Greater Wellington region attended. Four workshops were held – Communication, Choices, Vision Stepping Stones and a final workshop entitled “Tomorrow’s Dream”. These workshops were designed for the young people to reflect and make connections with like-minded young people who also have a dream for a better society. This event was an opportunity for young people to have a safe space to reflect on strengths and issues within their communities, what they would like their future to look like and their role as a young person in creating that future. The event was a great success.

On Friday 23rd May Challenge 2000 celebrated youth week with an event, Be the Change Challenge, organised and run by our Youth Week Committee. It was a fantastic evening which saw Challenge 2000 working with The Rock and Johnsonville Youth Room to empower and support our Youth Committee to bring their event, Be the Change Challenge – positive responses to bullying, to life. Our event was held at The Rock in Ngauranga.

Our youth committee was made up of Matekino, Ivan, Shannon, Robert, Mandy and Leah, who were supported by Bridget, Edwardene and Hezekiah (The Rock). Over a period of six weeks, these young people met to talk, discuss, dream, organise and learn about the theme of Youth Week – Be the Change and what it meant for them and how they would translate that into a meaningful event for young people.

Through our talks and discussions we discovered a passion for Anti-bullying and discovered that Pink Shirt day (Stop Bullying Campaign) was on the Friday we were going to run our event. Things fell into place and we talked about how we wanted to shape Aotearoa. We decided on doing small workshops that would introduce the young people who would participate in our event into different positive responses to bullying. We took participants through a journey – power of words, overcoming being a bully or being bullied, strategies for anti bullying in school, communities, families and friends and opportunities to think about how we want to shape Aotearoa.

We would like to thank John Archbold from Archbold Design for painting Aotearoa for us over two canvases with the empowering words we wanted young people to reflect on and choose which one(s) they would utilise to shape Aotearoa.

Painted by John Archbold

Also a very huge thanks to The Rock for allowing us the use of their venue for our event as well as all the leaders who came along to help out on the evening too. It was a great to have our two groups of young people come together, meet, discuss different topics and participate during the evening.