I’ve been working with Wanaka Young Change Makers, a Kahu Youth group, for almost a year now. We’ve done some amazing things in that year; carried out a waste audit at MAC, made a movie, explored Wanaka for free stuff to do, planted trees – to name but a few. This year we want to carry on this work and to do this we need a little bit of money to get started.
The waste audit we carried out at MAC identified that organic waste, as in food, was the area that needed sharpening up. This has also been noticed by a few members of Team Green and between us all we would love to set up a worm farm at school to help capture the organic waste and turn it into valuable nutrient rich compost.
One of the main issues that we face when we want to carry out sustainable actions is not having the money to pay for some of the equipment we need. We seem to be able to find the time and the energy but a worm farm costs money. Worms cost money. Where do we get that money from? That’s the big questions.
Rich, one of the amazing youth workers at Kahu Youth, told me about a pool of funding money available from the Minsitry of Youth Development. After discussing this together, we agreed that this would be a fantastic place to start to get some funds to make this project happen. Even if we weren’t successful then it would be great practice for the next funding application that comes along. When it comes to filling out forms, it’s not always the most exciting thing to do. WYCM like exciting, so how could we make this more exciting? It didn’t take long for us to realise that it could have a lot to do with the place that we go to when fill out these forms.
Remembering our exploration of Wanaka last year, we knew that Wanaka Station Park is a pretty cool place to hang out and, they have a enormous table too. Perfect. It was sweltering hot, there were no walnuts on the floor and the pears were hard as, but it still offered an great destination to talk through the project and fill out the application.
We had an awesome couple of hours, Chloe and Megan took it in turns to do the writing (they’ve both got amazing handwriting and we thought that may help), while the rest of us contributed our ideas and discovered how good we were at balancing on a thin concrete ledge. It was also a great opportunity for Ange, the new ultra fantastic youth worker at Kahu youth to get to know us a little better and see the kind of actions we like to take.
The application is now in. We discovered on this trip that we do need to take cookies with us to Wanaka Station Park at this time of year, the food isn’t in as plentiful a supply as it is in April. Fingers crossed we’re successful with our application and we can start to tell everyone about our plans in more detail.