Welcome to GCNZ and 2018 Wrap-Up
Hello and happy mid-year!
Firstly, welcome to Global Citizenship NZ and our new blog. This platform is a space for us to share our news, learning resources, good global reads and spotlight interesting change-making happening around the world. We are looking forward to sharing all this and more with you, and we will be welcoming community contributors as well if you feel you have something to say. To kick this off, we are going to provide you with some introduction to our organisation and team, and share some exciting happenings from last year.
Re-introducing Global Citizenship NZ
GCNZ is a small, by-youth, for-youth organisation. We are based in Auckland, New Zealand and have been running since 2016 in a couple different forms. Originally the Global Citizenship Course, a series of workshops given in Western Springs High School, which expanded to AUT University in 2017. Now in 2019, we come to you as a civics education and youth mobilisation company run by a team of six, all 19 to 22 years old.
What do we do?
Our main action is providing global education in schools, teaching classes on politics, environment, poverty, culture, conflict, human rights and more. We also provide mentoring and help to high schoolers & tertiary students for change-making, whether this is running your own activism campaign, event, or finding which study/career options might be right for you in these fields. We are here to give you a heads up on making positive change in the world - starting with a base education and then empowering you with the tools, connections and know-how to do something about it.
Coming up at GCNZ are new expeditions, courses and projects. Until then, you can find out more about what we do here.
Meet our team:
We have a main team of six members, three of which are our directors. The original 2016 team started with just Ariana, Favor and Ery, who remains now as a shareholder while she completes her education at Harvard University. Since growing into present-day GCNZ we have solidified our main team, and have a network of tens of other young people who help us with specific projects, whom we are very grateful for. Below is our current team, who you can read more about here:
Emma Chapman, Executive Director
Ariana Brunet, Creative Director and Founder
Tegan Ranstead, Event and Communications Director
Francis Flores, Financial Advisor
Favor Nweke, Course Content Advisor
Pratibha Singh, Remote Expeditions Officer
Ery Zhu, Founder and Shareholder
More info about our team and what we do can be found around this website or by contacting us, but for now let’s recap everything that happened last year!
Our Biggest Year Yet
2018 was quite the year here at GCNZ. We have been lucky enough to meet some amazing people and see so much inspiring action around Aotearoa, many of whom we will introduce to you in future blogs. So, what made 2018 such a big year for our team?
First of all, we switched up our business model and became an official organisation. For two years, the Global Citizenship Course ran stand-alone sets of workshops for high schoolers. This model was great for us, but when asked to deliver the course in a school, we realised what direction was best. In January of 2018, Ari, Emma and Tegan sat in Merge Cafe (run by Lifewise, a kind speaker at our courses) and redesigned GCNZ. We registered as an official company, submitted our application for Not-for-Profit status, and planned our year.
We took part in the Climate Challenge Conference and Oceans Festival. Run by amazing teams of young people, including GCNZ alumni, we were honoured to be part of these events. The Climate Challenge is a 2-day conference, hosting seminars and workshops on climate change and youth change-making. For the first time ever, the Auckland Oceans Festival was held in Mission Bay, hosting multiple organisations for ocean conservation, environment and social change.
We spoke on a panel at AIESEC’s Education for Impact event. Yet another youth-run organisation doing incredible things, AIESEC invited us to speak at their event on the importance of education. The talk was centred around education in developing countries and Aotearoa. Our Director Emma spoke alongside three other education figures: Diann Fisher, Deputy Principal of Diocesan; Dean Pendergrast, Founder of enrolmy; and Anney Collin, Founder of RATA Teachers Support.
We attended UNESCO’s Global Citizenship Education Awards at Parliament. All thanks to UNESCO NZ, Ari and Emma flew to Parliament (just a few hours after sitting an exam!) to see the three winners of these new awards in their ceremony. You can read about the winners here.
We partnered with the P3 Foundation to help them put poverty in the past. The P3 Foundation are a youth mobilisation charity aimed at eradicating extreme poverty. We are proud to partner with them for future projects, so stay tuned for lots of exciting events and opportunities from this partnership! Learn more about their amazing work here.
We taught nearly 300 students at our first official company school visit. We spent a day in May teaching 285 Year 9 students about politics and government, both in NZ and around the world. This was such a rewarding day for us and we were lucky to engage with so many bright, capable students.
Overall, 2018 brought a lot of changes and growth for GCNZ. We remodelled, designed, planned, executed and hit the drawing board repeatedly, and we have been so excited to hit the ground running in 2019 with new courses and opportunities for students, schools and organisations alike.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us in our journey so far. We can’t wait to show you everything we have been working so hard on. This next part of 2019 and 2020 will be a great time for the education and empowerment of global citizens.
Keep up with our updates, great global news, and exciting opportunities, on Facebook and Instagram.
We hope you’ve all had a happy and safe year so far, and we’ll see you soon!
