 Kia ora te whanau. So cool to be here, so cool to be up on stage and see all of your beautiful faces. I just wanted to kick off by really acknowledging our youth panel who are up here again. Can we please give them a round of applause? And to acknowledge the team at New Frontiers and EHF for creating space for that to happen. Really powerful, really important. Too often I think there's kind of token gestures where people are invited to speak on behalf of young people, but we don't actually create opportunities for young people to speak directly to their experiences, to their perspective, to their vision for their future, for our future. So just really want to acknowledge that. Kia ora. Thank you. So this is me, a little hototu down on the west coast of the South Island. Little mischief maker. This is my Turanga Waiwai. This is my place of strength. Who's been to the west coast of the South Island? Wow heaps of people. Awesome. Totally beautiful place growing up, beached down the backyard, bush over the road. It's a pretty low socioeconomic part of our country, but a beautiful part of our country. I went to Buller High School in Westport in the Big Smoke. We had about 120 students I think in third form or year nine, and by year 13 there was seven of us. Most of my peers dropped out of school at 15, hit the drugs, hit the bongs. Maybe you've got a job up the coal mine or at the cement works. And that's kind of what's happened for a lot of generations. And I guess it's a similar story for a lot of our rural provincial communities across Aotearoa, New Zealand. And now the coal mines winding up, the cement works is winding up, which is awesome for climate, but really challenging for livelihoods. Over the last two years more than a thousand jobs have been lost in the local community, which has devastating consequences for local people. So it's also an opportunity to think about what is the new story for some of our particularly challenged rural communities. So inspiring to hear about Megan's work this morning and excited to learn more. As a young person, so I was the first in my family to go to university. I moved to Dunedin, went to Otago, and for the first time just fell in love with learning and was surrounded by other people who were passionate about learning and started learning about a lot of these big issues in our world. And as a young person found it really confronted, found it really overwhelming, and my passion was creativity, entrepreneurship. I just started asking what could I do as a young person? What could I do to make a difference? So as a group of students at uni in response to learning about climate change and some of these big environmental issues, we created an adventure festival where we walked from one end of the West Coast to the other over a month engaging with all the local schools and communities. We planted over 5,000 native trees. We removed over six tonnes of rubbish from West Coast beaches, had musicians and performers play in the evenings, and we did all of this on a budget of next to nothing. And it just blew me away the creativity, the ingenuity, the resourcefulness that young people can bring when they feel like they find their passion and compare it with a sense of purpose that's bigger than that. The other thing we did was produce a film that year about four young New Zealanders who were taking action on climate change and environmental issues. And the stories of these young kiwis in a film called Carving the Future ended up winning the Colorado International Film Festival. It was one of three finalists in the world for the BBC's Best Newcomer Award, and just blew me away how powerful the stories of these young kiwis could be to inspire action and inspire others. So I set up inspiring stories. Based on those experiences, I thought, wow, imagine how many other young New Zealanders there are out there taking action to make a difference. Imagine if every young New Zealander unleashed their potential to change the world. What would it take to make that happen? What are the frameworks, the experiences, the pathways we could design to achieve that, to make that a reality? We talk about Aotearoa New Zealand, this tiny little country at the bottom of the world, and the opportunity we have is an incubation nation. What could we pilot here to mobilise an entire generation to explore these big issues that affect our future, to dream their dreams for a beautiful future, for our collective future, to build their ideas and skills to make a difference? So one of the things we created is an amazing national event called Festival for the Future. Has anyone been to Festival before? Quite a few people, yep. So brings together about 1300 young movers and shakers, a real showcase of what's possible, a chance to explore some of these big issues of our time, to build ideas and skills to make a difference. It's been so cool to see that grow. I'd just like to offer that as an invitation to weave you in in some way. There's so many incredible fellows with remarkable stories who have these incredible visions for the future, would love to weave you in to help inspire and support our next generation of young people to dream big, find their passion, find their purpose and make a difference. More recently, we started doing a lot more work in rural and provincial communities around Aotearoa New Zealand. So reflecting back on my roots down on the West Coast, this is where I see some of the big challenge, some of the big need in our communities. So we'd run a really small-scale pilot programme that worked with about 20 young people in some of New Zealand's more marginalised, lower socioeconomic rural communities. Of the 23 of them ended up winning local hero medals as part of the New Zealander of the Year Awards last year, had reported significant increases and they're more optimistic about the future. They're more ambitious, they're more resilient. They've built their teamwork, their problem-solving skills. And so this year, we've scaled it up from 20 to 250. It's stretched us like never before and huge shout-out to our team. But seeing how powerful and how transformative this can be for young people in our rural communities. So I guess, again, invitation, if you're interested in how do we empower and support the next generation of change-makers and young social entrepreneurs to realise their potential, would love to have a conversation with you. If you're looking for ways to engage with rangatahi, young people in Aotearoa, New Zealand, if you want to collaborate, if you want to get involved, if you want to get in support, would love to have a conversation with you. Kia ora, tato. Thank you. Rapaera Tawhai