 Hiora, kaupai te hiri e tine e ra mingamahi o tine ropu amine. Ko opuka toku monga ko wama ka reri toku awa ko iroa ko poarangi toku waka ko jusuf. Mia mei toku te puna ko Ian toku papa ko Patricia toku mama ko hoi hepa mea Isaac mea bal oku tamariki ko Julia toku ino ha. Tena koto, tena koto, tena koto kato. Hi, I'm Julia. My mountain is Mount Hutt in the South Island. My river is the Waimakariri and my waka is Christchurch. I honour my grandparents Joseph and Mae, my parents Ian and Patricia and my children Joe, Izzy and Bal. My story brings me to the place where I stand today and what a beautiful place it is. It feels very special to be here with you all and I honour all of the work and araha that I see that is so apparent to me as I look around. Thank you for inviting me to be with you today. So, I wanted to share a little bit of my story. My work with common unity was ceded by my parents, both children of the Great Depression who in their very working class, Nofril's approach for parenting believed that a proper education meant having a backpack filled with practical skills that this was as essential as academic pursuits. My mother's mantra was just to get on with it. I spent large amounts of my time as a child delivering eggs around my community in return for fruit, plants or money. It was not uncommon for me to find the community at home, after school, cooking, preserving or sewing together. It's just how we rolled. Alongside my local community growing up, I learnt to grow food, cook, chop wood, rebuild my bike, preserve fruit, pluck freshly culled chickens and roast lumps of meat after first experiencing the full process of their demise. But perhaps the ultimate gift they gave me was the one that they didn't count on. My father, being unable to pursue most professions, given that he was illiterate, became a prison officer, a job that constantly broke his heart. And from my earliest times, I can recall lying in my bed, listening to him quietly narrating reports to my mother who would write them up for him. Except they weren't really reports. They were the stories of the men that he was in charge of incarcerating. The stories of how they got to be where they were. Ratched stories at times. Men who were broken. I came to understand that those random families that arrived on Sundays for roasts and left with boxes of garden produce and hand knitted woollies were actually ex-inmates. This was never explained to me by my parents. It's just how it was. The same feeling of outrage and injustice that I felt as an eight-year-old listening and trying to make sense of these things has never really left me. I honour my parents today for demonstrating community, resourcing me with skills that could be used as personal currencies, a sense of social justice and, above all else, a commitment to being vegetarian. It was to come when I found myself alone with three children and a terminal illness, the seeds of resilience that my parents had sow and germinated. And so too did the curious experience of being so deeply challenged but without fear. I could do this thing. I had what it took and I simply needed to just get on with it. When I was well again, I wondered if my story might be of use to the other stories that I kept hearing in my wider community. And the idea of common unity was born. This morning I speak on behalf of the community that I work alongside. That is so dear to me. Common unity is a charity that operates in collaboration with Ipuni School in Loha Hutt. We have a role of about 100 students with many challenges in our community. Common unity started as a pilot, a strange, crazy experiment to see whether it was indeed possible to feed the 100 children of the school from what we could grow and resource locally. With the belief that given support, communities can take this responsibility on for themselves. The Ministry of Education gave us the use of a disused soccer field and then later a classroom which we turned into a community room and workspace. We invite our parents to come to school with their children six days a week where we all learn together. Many of our families are living in challenging situations, suffering adversity and hardship. Our place of unification is meeting the needs of our children sustainably and collectively, using time and gifting to transact with one another, growing richer without the use of money. This is our place of transformation and strength. Anyone is welcome to attend any of our sessions and workshops, local parents, families from our wider community, businesses and corporate friends, thus creating diversity of skills, ethnicities and backgrounds. We knit a new story together. Our offering to all participants is our modest but growing collection of social enterprises and open sessions. We have a recycled bike library, cooking sessions, a nationwide bee education project, a knitting project producing blankets for our children and a sewing enterprise that produces clothing and goods from recycled fabrics and corporate uniforms, a playgroup, health clinic and a community honey project. We do not service provide nor do we implement any programs whatsoever. Everyone is welcome to receive and everyone is asked to give back. Anyone can have support from a garden or home through to assistance with developing a business or an enterprise, advocacy or support. What we can't forget as a group, we reach out forward into our wider community and network of supporters. We take resources that others throw away and reuse them. Our garden itself and acre of food production and food forest was created from 15 local resources all found within a five kilometre radius of where some of the greatest poverty in the Hutt Valley exists. We have our so good project which recycles textiles and corporate uniforms into plastic free packaging solution and clothing for our children. Sorry Charlotte. We hold our own seed bank and make our own skincare range. We dig over each other's gardens, we cook together, we help each other out. Actions that are entirely led and owned by the community. We get grumpy with one another and don't always agree but we are learning to understand each other's stories. Above all we laugh a lot. We also see the abundance of economic opportunity that surrounds the very issues we are needing to solve. By developing these ideas into years to come and connecting with a growing body of like mindedness, our vision is to share our model into many communities. By using alternative forms of exchange rather than just money with reciprocity and fair share, being underpinning values of our organisation, we are able to celebrate the wealth that we do have. Fertile soil, time, innovation and each other. We are constantly reminded of the magic that happens when we keep our actions child focused. We work with the idea that communities are ecologies too, aligned to the plight of the ecologies of our natural world. And that the plight of one is reflected in the health of the other. And that just maybe if we are able to restore our ecologies in human communities, we have a chance of saving our wider natural environments. Or as Edgar Kahn, the grandfather of time-being, he puts it, no more throwaway planet, no more throwaway people. So these are my colleagues. They are our Ipuni farmers. All of them grow food every week, but they are also growing change. They are our major stakeholders, the children of our village in whose name we call to action our community. We are able to feed ourselves locally and organically at the cost of 10 cents per child with our service providing or corporate sponsorship. Our families run these sessions. They are our leaders and our change-makers. Self-esteem, it grows from learning, I am capable, I am lovable. We have found so much local food. We realise the issue is not that we have a food scarcity when it comes to feeding our communities. We are needing networks, collaboration and sharing across New Zealand. We call constantly upon government to fund community-led projects such as our own. To allow communities to respond to their own needs, utilising the individual needs and strengths of each. That the model of funding a corporate response of low-quality food-like products and delivering them into school creates an industry of poverty out of our most vulnerable. We ask for assistance to resource communities to enable them to create their own solutions to develop employment across social enterprises that are locally owned and networked with one another, thus creating resilience and restoring heart back into the broken places. Communities that again revere the role of a primary caregiver, bringing parents back home to their communities as much as possible. This is the common unity dream for the children of Aotearoa. But whilst we wait for the system to catch up, we just simply get on with it, recognising that many families and our planet simply cannot wait. This is Vic. He has one of the most extraordinary stories that you would ever hear, and he volunteers time in our garden and is learning to be a beekeeper and helping us develop our community honey project into an enterprise that will employ four dads later this year. We want to educate and employ as many locals as possible to grow together fund where regular givers donate the equivalent of a coffee per week. Our honey project received funding from these cute little people, our sunflower farmers. Every year they grow a field of sunflowers, and each year call them around New Zealand as part of something we call Project Sunshine. This was in response to them wanting to live in a community that looked beautiful. They now have 350 different communities around New Zealand who have taken their seed and the project on and are now also growing sunflowers as living works of art in their community as well as highlighting the plight of our bees. Our little ones are learning that simple actions of sharing can amount to significant change. They are learning that they are pollinators of change and such proud moments this week for our bee daddies who were able to gift back to the children our first honey harvest that their seed money had funded all 120 kilos of it. So this is Dar. Her husband, Nicklin and their three sons were refugees from Indonesia. They were given a cold and damp flat in a building full of addicts to live in and they have not yet been reassigned to suitable housing. Her children suffer asthma and Nicklin became a beekeeper with us when he realised that giving his boys honey each day stopped his boys from wheezing. Dar comes to spend most of her days with us. We employ her to run our kocha kitchen sessions. She has a budget of $10 per 100 meals and sometimes doesn't even spend that. Our kocha sessions are open to anyone in our community. We cook with the children and then have a community lunch and afterward share surplus meals and produce with those that have helped. This is our idea of what a food bank should look like. Every child should have a dar at their school and every school's dar should be supported by their wider community. This is my friend Peter and when he looks around his community he sees cooperation and hope. We are expanding, currently fundraising to build an off-grid community kitchen and another urban park and food forest that Hutt City Council has leased us. A beautiful facility showcasing green technologies, community cooperation and education. A place to incubate enterprise and feed 500 children a day from. A place to grow change. It's time to restore dignity and strength to our people. When we connect together and put our children's needs back into the heart of our village and our actions our economies grow strong, our planet is respected and nobody is left behind because when we share we get there together. Thank you very much.