Ko te wānanga, kei a koutou kē.
Ko te wānanga, kei a koutou kē. The knowledge is within you.
This article was originally written for the Edmund Hillary Fellowship Blog by Bex De Prospo and shares the early story of Kia Kotahi Ako.
As the Edmund Hillary Fellowship grows, so do the opportunities it creates for Fellows to work together on tangible initiatives to tackle some of the world’s biggest problems. In one of the most ambitious collaborations to date, Fellows Joanne McEachen (C8), Waitaha, Ngāti Māmoe, Ngāi Tahu and Sarah Grant (C2) are combining their diverse international education experience to generate greater learning and well-being outcomes for Aotearoa’s rangatahi and tamariki. Through the newly-formed charitable trust, Kia Kotahi Ako, Joanne and Sarah are working together to disrupt an education system which they say isn’t working for all, particularly for Māori.
“Our current method of education is not serving every child,” Joanne says. “It was designed on a faulty premise, an old paradigm, following the English model. We’re not English. We’re New Zealanders. We are Māori. We are a mix of other Pacific nations. Although we are an international country, we should be honouring Tangata whenua and Tangata Tiriti and setting up for success for our people. We need to take a step back and remember who we are, how we fit into the world and how we contribute to humanity.” There are discrete examples of this kind of thinking taking place throughout Aotearoa, she says, but none yet at scale.
“There are entrenched systems of colonisation within education,” Sarah adds. “And a historically narrow view of what education even means. From a practical standpoint, the funding that’s available to deliver innovative education initiatives is hugely restricted and who gets to make the decisions is often not reflected by the communities they are serving.”
It’s this desire to engage rangatahi and whānau in their education that inspired Joanne, Sarah to establish Kia Kotahi Ako Trust, an unconventional education Trust which focuses on traditional Māori ways of being, enriching communities and rejecting an education system which has been oppressing and excluding many learners for generations. As the newly established joint CEO of Kia Kotahi Ako, Sarah will work with Trustees, Joanne, Andrew and Nikora Ngaropo (C8), Te Rarawa, Tuhoe, Ngāti porou, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahungunu to fund and create initiatives which align with this vision, some of which they expect will be developed and delivered directly by rangatahi. They are in the process of appointing a Māori Tumu Whakarae (CEO) as they build their bi-cultural organisation.
They’re diving deep into the Edmund Hillary Fellowship to achieve their vision. With other Fellows providing both funding and learning tools, Kia Kotahi Ako epitomises a new, richer era of collaboration for the Fellowship. “One of the joyful things that’s coming from EHF is that Fellows are willing to fund this mahi without all the usual strings attached” Joanne says. “That paradigm shift is creating a lot of stimulation and interest across the team. The Fellows who are supporting us get that the answers need to come from the community. We can’t dictate what the solutions are, only offer space for them to be co-created.”
Kia Kotahi Ako will work in tandem with organisations like The Learner First to create new solutions which concurrently address education challenges at a community and systems level. The way to do this, they say, is by providing processes for communities and places of learning, rather than a “‘prescribed outcome’ of that process. The aim is to develop co-creation models which will elicit answers from communities about what’s important to them, while creating space for existing systems to answer the questions that emerge from those discussions.
Both Sarah and Joanne have hands-on classroom and education systems-change experience in Aotearoa and globally and say that their collaboration is a natural evolution of the work they’ve been doing for their entire careers. “Before I’d even really met Jojo, I was at one of the EHF social meet-ups and I overheard her say ‘Sarah doesn’t know it yet but she’s coming to work for me,’” Sarah laughs. “I just saw how much untapped talent she had,” Joanne says. “And I knew we had to find a way to work together.’
After teaching geography in the UK and then boot-strapping an education-focused social enterprise, Sarah jumped at the opportunity to lead an initiative with a more flexible approach to funding and an ethos built on removing barriers. With Sarah’s experience as a social entrepreneur and Joanne’s deep experience in international research and service delivery, the two make a natural collaborative pair.
“My whole career has been focused on supporting students, teachers and education systems,” Sarah says. “But I’d see programmes I’d worked on for years stopped by the whims of a changing government. And then later, scaling an international social enterprise, I quickly realised that everyone in the sector was trying to solve the same problems, competing for the same funding.”
Founder of The Learner First, a best-selling author and international thought-leader on education service delivery, Joanne has deep ties with the NZ school system and the Ministry of Education. “I spent the first 45 years of my life as a teacher, principal and a public servant,” she says. “I didn’t understand how to be an entrepreneur. That’s a big part of the reason why I joined EHF: to grow those social entrepreneurial skills. When you're working in the business space you can do things faster and get right to the heart of issues more quickly.”
In the recent EHF Impact Springboard virtual conference, Kia Kotahi Ako reached deep into the Fellowship to connect with what Joanne refers to as the Fellowship’s collective heart and desire to do good in the world. What has begun to evolve since then is a full whānau effort. Joining Tū Pouakai as an early initiative for Ki Kotahi Ako is a national roll-out of STEM programme We Share Solar, championed by Barry Neal (Cohort 6). Other Fellows have invested funds in the Trust, with sponsorship by Satya Kumar (Cohort 7) and Joanne, herself, through The Learner First.
Sarah clocked in as Co-CEO in early May there’s a lot of work to do. “The amount of engagement and enthusiasm we’ve had already from the EHF community is amazing,” she says. “Moving forward, we’re eager for some more coaching and support around not-for-profit establishment and infrastructure, as well as additional funding that we can allocate to innovative projects.” They are also looking ahead to the creation of an advisory board, one which – Sarah hastens to add – must and will feature rangatahi.
Both are introspective about the road ahead, acknowledging that there are more questions than answers. “If we knew the answer, we would have done it already,” Sarah says. “There are no holistic solutions yet for education that can be done at scale.”
“We’ve used collective cognition a lot,” Joanne says. “But we can’t do this academically any more. We need to move to collective consciousness and heart. This is more than just education, or health or wellbeing - we want to solve local and global challenges using education as the means to do so. We have to use more than just our heads and minds to solve these ‘impossible problems’. All of us have to bring our whole person to the work. We have to be human now, or we won’t get there.”