We kicked off our active week with a calming (and challenging!) yoga class held upstairs in the Movement Studio at Papa Hou. Watching the sun set over the Botanic Gardens while we pulled out our best yoga moves was a pretty special experience. About half of our class were new to yoga so you can image there was lots of laughter and a few creative poses. Other activities we got to enjoy at Elevate Fitness during Youth Week included a wāhine boxing class and youth spin class.

On Thursday we hosted our first ever Pride Climb at the Adventure Centre, which was an incredible celebration event for rainbow rangatahi in Ōtautahi. We partnered with Mana Tipua, Inside Out, and The Unbreakable Foundation to deliver an event that was a safe space for socialising, sharing kai, hearing about rainbow programmes available, and of course, climbing! We had awesome feedback from all of the rangatahi and whanau who attended and we are now feeling really excited about planning future rainbow events during the year. This event was a great reminder that above all else, young people are just looking forward a space to hang out and feel safe!

The icing on the cake of Youth Week 2024 was seeing a massive turnout at the Ōtautahi Youth Mākete. This was our second market of the year delivered in partnership with Te Aukaha and our first market ever in the new Black Box Theatre space at Papa Hou. After weeks of background work creating signs, finessing the stall layouts, building our market playlist, enlisting volunteers, and making decorations at the 4C Centre we were more than ready for the day to dawn!

With 35 unique stallholders and a super talented music duo to bring the vibes, the day went off without a hitch. As always we were blown away by the quality and diversity of products available. A huge congratulations to all of our first-time stallholders also who were brave enough to sign up and put in the hard mahi getting their products and stalls market-ready.

Some reflections from Youth Week 2024

  • The theme of Youth Week this year was “we may not have it all together, but together we have it all!” and this was well and truly proved throughout the week. Without the ‘togetherness’ of our programmes and events we wouldn’t have been able to deliver even half of our events. It really takes a community to deliver cool opportunities for rangatahi and we are so grateful for our communities willingness to jump in and help out.
  • If you came along to Saturday’s Youth Mākete we probably don’t need to tell you this but we have some VERY talented young business owners here in Ōtautahi. What an exciting time to be involved with youth enterprise – the quality of products and passion of stallholders seems to increase with each market.
  • Seeing our students from the Te Puna Wai o Waipapa (Hagley) ELL class hanging out in the gym and getting to try loads of new workout equipment was really rewarding. It also made us think, how often do young people really get invited to these typically ‘adult’ exercise spaces and what can we do to make places like gyms more accessible to all ages?

 

Thank you to our awesome Youth Week funders Sport Canterbury and Ara Taiohi – we literally couldn’t have done it without your financial support! And thanks to all of the instructors, trainers, and staff who made our week possible – we can’t wait for our next collabs.

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