Generational Wealth of Knowledge
Watch the recording here. Our Rangatahi Advisory Panel are all about change – changing minds, changing systems and changing the world. And if that sounds like a grand claim, you need to read this update on what our shadow board of young professionals has been doing recently.
The Aotearoa Circle is in its second year of having a Rangatahi Advisory Panel (RAP). The panel was formed to give life to the Circle’s core purpose – to restore Aotearoa’s natural capital for future generations.
In order to do this the right way, it is essential to have representatives of those future generations around the table. That is the thinking behind the RAP, to act as a shadow board of under 30 year olds, who are holding the Circle to account and giving their input into our shared work. It is, as RAP Coordinator and mentor Izzy Fenwick says, not a focus group. The members are not just there to give opinions (although they can and should). Crucially, they are there to ask questions, questions like “if there is technology out there which could help address the twin crises of nature and climate change, why aren’t we considering this?” That question, asked by the RAP in 2023, helped lead to our biotechnology workstream, which produced these recently published reports.
The 2024 RAP has made two significant fresh contributions in the last month. The first of these was a visit to Wellington to meet with Minister of Climate Change, Hon. Simon Watts. The meeting was at the invitation of the Minister, who first encountered the RAP at our Parliamentary hui in March.
The meeting, over a working lunch in the Beehive, was a chance for the RAP to provide feedback on the Government’s draft Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP2). It also enabled the RAP to have a free and frank discussion about their fears for the future and how they see the systems change needed to reverse our current course towards climate and nature crises.
Maggie Powell from Silver Fern Farms said the following about the experience of navigating Government and fronting for a Ministerial meeting “it can be summed up by the word daunting… but the beauty of having this panel… we were all able to present a united front to the minister of how the draft Emissions Reduction Plan was being interpreted by eight pretty strong willed young people across leading New Zealand businesses. The Minister led on making us feel pretty comfortable… and his reactions to what we were saying enabled us to have that conversation with him.”
Then a week later, several members of the 2024 and 2023 RAPs helped host a webinar designed to spread understanding of what the Rangatahi Advisory Panel is and how the model could be applied in other organisations. That model has already been picked up by Circle Leading Partner Mercury, which is in the process of creating a RAP of its own, something which Lucie Drummond, Executive GM of Sustainability at Mercury spoke to. Lucie said of the two RAP panel sessions they have held “I would find it hard to tell you another conversation that I have walked away from feeling more energized than the two conversations that we had with the (RAP) panels.”
As to how the RAP members feel about the challenges we all face, Morgan Pepper from ANZ summed it up in the webinar like this, “I’m not optimistic, I don’t think everything will work out fine so we don’t need to worry about it. But I am hopeful we can make it happen.”
If you have any interest in promoting the voices of young people in Aotearoa or learning how the RAP works at The Circle, or creating something similar in your own organisation, the recording of this webinar is available below, or please reach out to us for background and advice.