A letter home — 2019
Happy birthday Mum,
70 today wow. 70 years ago who would have thought that today would be like it is. Radically different. For a start you were in London and soon to be on a boat as a wee baby to go the other side of the planet. Nanna and Pop were some brave people to take a punt and try a new life in the antipodes. Especially with half a dozen or so kids. I think it’s a family trait to take big leaps into the unknown. Nature or nurture, dunno. I know you have always inspired me to try something and give it a go even when the outcome is uncertain, and this year has been another classic example. OMG LOL.
Where to start?
Well there is the zoo I guess. Zoe and I decided to buy an old outdoor education centre in Raglan. Why? Why not?! It seemed like a good idea at the time. Ha, it’s turned out be be a fantastic idea, even if we have no idea what we are doing. We are turning it into a school camp for kids to learn enviro-tech. We are hoping we can teach them the skills they can use to save the planet we seem to have royally screwed up. We have called it The Institute of Awesome, and we ask the kids help on secret projects where we go into the community and solve a mystery. Like, there is pollution getting into the harbour somehow, and we don’t know where it’s coming from. Let’s go investigate and see if, by using technology and science, we can help solve the mystery. I tell people it’s like a real life Scooby-doo episode. We opened the camp last week — unofficially. But we said to ourselves, let’s see if schools want to come first, then we can figure out how to run the camp. LOL. We have a bunch of schools booked in already so I think we need to hang on tight and see where this one goes. 😬 www.inawe.nz
The camp needs the support of industry too, it’s basically a 50 year old camp and we need to reboot it with technology. But it’s also a pretty cool place to go and hang out, so we have made it available to teams to use as a place to go and have a retreat, do some strategy or innovation away from the bump and grind of the office, and by doing so they sponsor kids on camp. Keep it really simple.
The big idea is if we can come up with a new model for school camps and outdoor education then we can help more and more camps setup around New Zealand and make them accessible to ALL kids without having to fork out $600. We know with the help of the community and industry we can make this work and it will be transformative for us all. We will create a new generation of kaitiaki and innovators who will solve the worlds big problems like clean energy, clean water and clean food with clean minds.
We have some cool partners we are working with, and will be making a big announcement about some of them very soon. There is a movement happening in Aotearoa and it’s pretty awesome.
So that’s full on, but that’s not all. Of course not. LOL.
We are also about to launch a new volunteering platform for New Zealand, called voluntarily.nz. We originally called it Voluntari.ly which had a much nicer URL, but some folk worried about the Libyan (.ly) connection. Ha, understandable.
This could (will) be big too. We have partnered with the Government and big tech employers as well as innovative content providers to create this new way of using your corporate volunteer days. Basically you can go help a teacher or a classroom learn something new and cool using your expertise. Like you might know a thing or two about design, or coding, or electronics or science, whatever you are good at. We match you up with a classroom who would really love your help on a project, or perhaps they just want some inspiration and to hear about cool jobs they never knew existed. We have partnered with the Tertiary Education Commission here in NZ to roll it out to every school. So next year we will have thousands of talented interesting people giving a class a hand learning something cool.
What is super cool about the project is that we have over 100 people who have helped code the platform. How cool is that?! Like the industry is literally building the platform they will use to volunteer with.
I really believe this will be a massive resource for our teachers and it will help make kids believe a little more that they can grow up to be anything they want to be. It’s all part of our master strategy at the charity to really transform education and empower the next generation to be the innovators the world desperately needs. And by innovator I don’t mean like me, a software guy. I mean someone who looks at the world in a whole new way and then goes about doing something different for the better of us all. A 14 year old girl who wants to become an environmental scientist. A 12 year old boy who wants to design smart fabrics. A 11 year old who has big ideas about how to change how we grow food to feed the planet.
We have really grown our OMGTech! programmes in particular our professional development for teachers this year too. We now work with 25 schools from the bottom to the top of Aotearoa NZ teaching their teachers how to teach science and technology.
We do some great mahi with communities all over, schools, iwi, passionate educators. We don’t sing and dance about a lot of our community work, as we are just honoured to be invited into those communities to listen to them and see how we can help create new opportunities for their youth. It’s enough reward working with the amazing kids.
All the work we do in the charity is inspired by you of course Mum. You had this amazing belief in us kids and everyone in your life and was always about positive impact. I think what we have started at the charity — in your awesome name — will continue to do just that. This next year we are scaling things up considerably with 22 people on the Pam Fergusson Charitable Trust team now, plus hundreds if not a thousand volunteers who help out with our programmes.
In other news, Vend is still rocking and I am helping out a bunch of other kiwi entrepreneurs scale their dreams. One day we will take a break and just read books for a while, but for now there is too much awesome stuff to do.
The kids all miss you, as do I. I wish we could have had an epic 70th birthday for you. We have a cake for you today. I like to think its the sort of cake you would make, banana, except not nearly as good as it’s a bought one. Too busy to bake 😂.
Who knows what will happen in another 70 years, what will the future be like? I think there will be 100,000 kids who have grown up and inspired their grand kids to go change the world. Perhaps a lot more. Who knows? But we are going to go find out.
Love you always,
Your son Vaughan.
A letter home — 2019 was originally published in vaughan.ai on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.