Providing a youth perspective of global issues are the building blocks for a 10-year-old Pārāwai School student set to make her mark on the world stage.
Avé Te Teira-King will be jetting to the Children’s General Assembly at the birthplace of Lego – Billund, Denmark, in September for her and 79 other 10 to 17-year-olds from across the globe, to develop democratic skills by creating solutions to current global issues.
The solutions the children develop are then put forward to global leaders at the United Nations General Assembly at New York City a week after the children’s assembly.
Avé, who is one of two New Zealand children attending the event, told The Profile her mother, Roanne Mitchell-Te Teira, applied for a spot for her at the assembly in February and she was “quite shocked and happy” to be accepted.
To prepare for the three day event in Denmark, Avé participated in digital co-creation workshops, which ran between 6pm and 9pm since April with other children from the likes of South Africa and Southeast Asia.
“Every workshop we think of problems or issues and we break them down to questions,” she said.
“The questions we would have is inequality for genders, schools, we would also have the government, how can we persuade the government and we would have all those hard issues that we could find solutions to.
“[In Southeast Asia] they don’t have much money so they have to have less education… they have a bunch of public schools with a bunch of free stuff and for some reason they get taught less stuff than [Pārāwai School] would get taught.”
The assembly, which is scheduled to take place between September 19 and 21, will entail the participants sharing their perspectives, solutions, and actions for a better world to a group of world leaders.
“In the end I’m really hoping to know more about the topics and get to know other topics,” Avé said.
Roanne said her daughter’s experience so far had “opened up her world”.
“For a ten-year-old trying to come up with a solution of how you can persuade the government and business CEOs to have better pay equality and gender is quite a massive topic… but I think it’s important they have a youth voice,” she said.
“It’s a little bit easier for her to talk about culture and accepting others and their beliefs coming from a Māori background.
“It’s opened up her world a lot… and how [the global issues] affect people in New Zealand.”
Roanne said around $7000 had so far been raised for her and Avé’s travel costs through the raffle prize draw event, Batons Up, plus mussel fritter and sausage sizzle sales, raffles, whanau support and a Givealittle online fundraising page.
“We’ve had some fantastic community support and we would just like to say thank you to the community and certain businesses,” she said.
Roanne also thanked the Hauraki Māori Trust Board for its support and that she and Avé aimed to raise a total of around $12,000.
DETAILS: To donate to help with Avé’s travel costs to attend the Children’s General Assembly in Denmark visit: givealittle.co.nz/cause/help-ave-attend-the-childrens-assembly-in-denmark.
