To recap the amazing year 2024 has been…

Over the last 12 months, we have:

• Supported rangatahi performers at Panmure Basin Fun Day 🎤

• Said mā te wā to staff members Matthew and Michelle 👋

• Welcomed Chloe, Sherry, Hope, and Siobhan onboard our staff 🤗

• Supported rangatahi performers at Puketāpapa Kite Day 🪁

• Supported rangatahi performers at Wynyard Quarter’s Your Big Backyard 🌊

• Attended the Ngā Wāhi Auaha Creative Spaces Conference in Te Whanganui-a-Tara ✈️

• Seen Te Kāhui recommence in-person programming at Mount Eden Corrections Facility, Auckland Women’s Prison, Tongariro Prison, Rolleston Prison and Christchurch Women’s Prison ✍️

• Had our Te Kāhui team set plans in-motion for a second chapbook alongside the incredible wāhine at Christchurch Women’s Prison 📖

• Doubled the Te Kāhui team in size since the beginning of the year 🌱

• Attended the Performing Arts for Young People Aotearoa annual hui 💡

• Ran our Event Pathways Programme!!! 🎫

• Overall, strengthened our team and processes to come back refreshed and strong for the new year! ⭐⭐⭐

To stay up-to-date with our mahi in 2025 or see what else we’ve been up to this year, check out our Instagram!

A personal reflection from yours truly (Hope) <3

Kia ora lovely people 💌🎀💕

If we haven’t met… kamusta!! My name is Hope, and I’ve had the absolute gift of being the Communications & Outreach Coordinator here at Youth Arts NZ over the past 5ish months. Basically a glorified social media content creator (but I’m not complaining).

If you’re reading this, it’s probably no surprise to you that both the non-profit and arts sectors have been in a BIG financial struggle lately. Put those two sectors together into a beautiful Venn diagram and BOOM!!! You get YANZ right in the middle.

As a result, it’s with the saddest of hearts that I share with you that my reign of terror in the YANZ office + socials has come to an end. Of course, in an ideal world, I would’ve loved to extend my contract for years and years to come, but that’s life! That said, I am SO BEYOND GRATEFUL for the time I’ve spent here at YANZ.

So without further ado, please bear with me as I hold you all by the hand and drag you on a trip down memory lane (and try not to cry on the way)!!!

I came to YANZ as a wide-eyed and bushy-tailed first-year university student, desperate for money. (No, I’m not kidding - you can ask GM Dani and she will testify that in my first ever conversation with her, I instantly said YES to this job because I told her I was running out of funds for my weekly steak & cheese pies.)

I’ve been a muso, theatre kid, and writer for as long as I remember, but I never really knew how I’d fit into the creative industry career-wise. I had just finished a dream internship at BIG FAN as their Programme Administrator but had NO IDEA what to do next. Did I mention I was also fresh off a menty b that made me change my degree and question my life’s purpose? #YIKES‼️

And then, as if the stars had aligned (the stars being superstar GMs Savina and Dani, from BIG FAN and YANZ, respectively), I woke up on the last week of my BIG FAN internship to this email from Dani:

And the rest is history.

I was late to my first day at YANZ. I emailed Dani saying my bus was 15 minutes late but I can now confess that I’d simply slept through my alarm.

The first few weeks looked like setting up email signatures, secretly swapping the creaky office chair for the comfy one, and figuring out how on EARTH to connect my prehistoric Windows PC to the yoffice Bluetooth speaker (in a room full of Mac users… go figure).

I guess you could say Baby’s First Big Project was launching our Instagram Close Friends story. It was initially supposed to be an IG Broadcast Channel, but after I had drafted a plan and gotten approval, we THEN realised that we needed to have 10K followers first.

Thanks Zuckerberg.

So, with Project Manager Chloe’s help, we started the Close Friends story instead - a mix of exclusive opportunities, BTS content, and (slightly) unhinged updates from me. Not my fault I was given free reign. This helped us build a little 70-strong community of YANZstagrammers whom I have never met in person but would literally consider my besties at this point.

Then I guess you could say my Next Big Thing was creating social media content for our 2024 Event Pathways Programme, spearheaded by our legendary Project Manager, Chloe, supported by our incredible EPP Co-Producer (now Te Kāhui Workshop Facilitator), Siobhan.

I came to one of the EPP days to interview participants and put together fun, casual, silly interview videos. Which I did. But I also got so much JOY out of simply being there, and witnessing the sheer wonder and inspiration on everyone’s faces: a great and well-needed reminder of what it’s all about!

AND THEN!!! Drum roll please!! 🥁🥁🥁 We launched #YouchYaps!!! (A casual and silly Reels/TikTok miniseries introducing the faces behind YANZ.)

My project. My baby. The initial reason I was brought onboard yet the kaupapa that took me EONS to finally launch. Looking back, I defs felt whakamā about pulling my coworkers away from their board reports, budget drafts and Zoom meetings to be like… “hey… do you have 15 minutes to make a tiktok…” But one karaoke night, twelve weekly wraps, and a million office yap sessions later, that feeling was gone.

AND THEN, of course, I caught COVID, and was forced to press pause on the entire thing.

As of today, I have two #YouchYaps videos APPROVED and READY TO POST (SO KEEP AN EYE OUT!!!), and have like six more to edit.

So watch this space (“this space” being our social media, of course)!!!

Closing sentiments…

Amidst a year full of change - moving out of home, starting university, entering the Big Girl Workforce, and more - YANZ was a pillar of stability. Out of everything in 2024, getting to do this job with this team is probably what I am most grateful for.

Getting to witness first-hand the way Chloe, Dani, Darius, Eric, Ruby, Sherry, Siobhan, Harrison and Phodiso build sustainable careers in the arts alongside their YANZ mahi, and THRIVE in both pursuits, has been incredibly inspiring.

Working in a rangatahi-led team, made up primarily of people of colour, has also been AMAZING. Too often, I’ve been the youngest person, or the only woman of colour, in the room, and have shrunk myself to be more digestible. But YANZ gave me a safe space to take up as much space as I deserved. To laugh loudly. To be vulnerable. To march into work and complain about the lady at the bus stop who tried recruiting me into a cult. To be unapologetically myself.

This is, for me, perhaps the saddest part about leaving YANZ: stepping away from an organisation where inclusivity isn’t some diversity initiative or tokenistic attempt at allyship, but simply the norm.

While this isn’t yet the norm within the wider arts sector in Aotearoa, I’d like to believe that YANZ is helping pave the way by building a work culture where everyone feels empowered to express themselves, whatever that might look like to them.

After all, isn’t that what art is all about?

Now, please indulge me one last time as I leave you with a YANZ 2024 photo dump 📸🎞️

Signing off one final time (or not… we’ll see… they can’t get rid of me that easily),

Hope xxx

About Youth Arts New Zealand (YANZ)

Youth Arts New Zealand (YANZ) is Aotearoa’s leading youth-led organisation with a vision for every young person across the motu to know the worth of their creative identity. Since YANZ’s founding in 2018, our team of creative rangatahi have run 400+ impactful events and projects, provided creative experiences for over 1,500 rangatahi across Aotearoa, and distributed over $890,000 in employment opportunities and artist fees to young people through our initiatives.