Letter addressing crime in Hamilton 1 Sept,2023
Re: Crime in the New Zealand
Children in New Zealand are feeling hopelessness, powerlessness, despair, and have done for many generations.
There is no support for their skills and dreams.
And we want them to behave “normally”. What is their “normal”?
Has anyone ever listened to them?
Does anyone know what they want for their lives?
And as for a “peaceful” life, it has not been provided for them.
Even with what their childhood home life is like, their future can be reclaimed by them.
But they have to be given the space and opportunity to find out who they are and what is possible for them.
Developing an interest can change a young person's self-mage. It is very important for a young person to feel a sense of worth – via using a talent, fulfilling a goal or developing competence in an artistic pursuit. -Read
Where is the place for finding out who you are?
Some will find their place through sport, there is funding and space for that.
Where do New Zealand’s young entrepreneurs go? The innovative, creative, ‘number 8 wire’ genius who are sitting at home working on their ideas every day and hiding them under their bed? Where is the space for them to “fit in” and design our new, marvellous future?
Genius and inventors must be cultivated and introduced to the right people to be nurtured. The child has to have somewhere safe to invent.
By the time youth are teenagers they are beyond being inspired.
Weekend Camps
Rotary in Hamilton sponsor six youth to two weekend camps per year which are inspiring and life changing. They did not receive any students from Hamilton schools for the sponsored weekend experience this year. Since covid, are young people so entrenched in staying indoors that they have lost their imagination and drive completely?
These camps should be every weekend for young people to participate, learn how to BE with other human beings. Are we losing our ability to develop relationships? We have to start with a relationship with ourselves, finding out who we are and what we stand for in the world. Then develop relationships with others, friendships, with another, then citizenship, becoming honoured and respected by our community. Only then can we become leaders, and then global leaders.
Start with the artistic expression in the small after school art club. Write rap if you want. Write, draw, build, sing, sew, and be safe to do so without judgement. Develop teamwork, communication skills, resilience, problem solving, and empathy, understanding how others feel and respect them. Make mistakes and receive encouragement and understanding from each other.
Become honoured by your community, which you then honour and respect.
Build on your dreams. Become inspired to study your own potential with other like-minded children who are your ‘tribe’, or ‘gang’ otherwise you will find a gang anyway. Be around people who support you. Are we supporting our children? The evidence says no.
If a child attends school all week maybe he can join the band practice on Friday after school. All instruments and mentors provided. Or the Wednesday after school games group where children learn to play chess, cards and board games with kind, friendly adults helping, developing positive relationships.
Children have been fed with television and screen violence and crime, superhero toys and little positive role-modelling. Our children are the superheroes. Let’s give them space to show us what they can do. Give children balanced opportunities. Train trips to Auckland and Wellington visiting arts, music, theatre. Visiting the arts in Hamilton!
What are the ‘Arts’?
The arts are present in everything we make to please our senses.
“to form, take shape, take on a particular or “specialized” shape, and that shape is a work of art. A governing mechanism which can only be ignored at our peril. Without which civilization loses its balance and topples over into social and spiritual chaos.”
We “form” (design/create) teams, clubs, pictures and poems. That shape is a work of art. Music, poetry, furniture, even shoes or dresses.
Education Throught Art – Herbert Read
A 40.000 year-old flute has been found, made from vulture bones. possibly one of the first musical instruments. The arts are not a therapy, they are a basic human necessity. Music should be played in birthing units, it’s played in shopping malls for a reason, and it’s played in the background at after school art clubs, or the children make music.
History
The International Child Art Foundation (icaf.org), follows children around the world going through wars, refugees, disease and plague. They have found that a child between the age 8-12 will determine their place in the world, whatever their circumstances. If young people have access to art they will develop empathy for others.
The International Child Art Foundation vision statement:
We inspire schoolchildren to boldly step beyond the boundaries set before them by envisioning an inclusive world where meaningful differences and diversity can enhance human discovery and collaborative innovation.
In Aotearoa we foster manaakitanga, caring for each other, the well-being of the community, engaging with one another and developing strong relationships.
The NZ Children’s Art House Foundation (arthouse.org.nz) was established by Shona Hammond Boys QSM and determined and that when children are given a safe, sacred space they run their own after school art clubs very successfully without adult “rules” and are enabled to powerfully contribute to their society in positive ways. A safe place to make connections and develop relationships.
Children’s Art Houses have been operating around NZ for 30 years in many forms as the community finds space for children to meet. There are no Children’s Art Houses in Hamilton.
This city desperately needs to hear its young people and give them a chance.
Children meet one afternoon a week for two hours, in a safe, completely dedicated space for them and others who come on different days. They will hold an exhibition of their work at the end of the term and be honoured by their community at an event. These children are becoming leaders. They work together to contribute to their society. They do not need ‘classes’, they don’t need to be ‘taught’ anything, they are able to teach us. Their art, their skills, their inventions and new innovations. Nobody is watching them, judging, comparing, assessment. They are safe. Their arts are safe. Nobody can take their art away, adults think they have a right to children’s art. The result of their ‘work’ in the club is not what they ‘produce’ but the method they used ‘within themselves’ to get there.
Some children are labelled ‘mischievous’, disruptive, but give them a dance class and they will participate in ‘normal’ classes. Others are seen as ‘daydreamers’ they need a place to dream. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote an article on medicated children once. It ended with “all Nobel Prize Winners were known as daydreamers in their childhood”.
· The Children’s Art House has two rules: Love Art: Be Kind. Any person, child or adult who breaks the rules is asked to leave.
· There is a co-ordinator employed to assist the children in their artwork and projects, and help them arrange the activities that they would like to participate in, bringing in mentors as required.
· The space must be completely dedicated to the children’s art club, not shared with adults, a sports facility or anything else.
Until you give children the respect that they deserve we will not have a new future, just rehashed promises.
We need all the bright sparks we can get in this country.
Hamilton’s Opportunity
Children are our leaders. We must respect them and their needs, they have been quashed for generations without self-directed art in schools, they are our innovators, NZ was known for its innovation, where are the children working on their ideas, where is the space we have made for them?
After school art clubs in NZ started 30 years ago and are throughout the United States and Australia’s Northern Territory.
They must be adopted in Hamilton City.
Hamilton City Council has a remarkable opportunity.
Hamilton has the opportunity to become the founding city to develop a special place for children’s arts to be prepared and performed in New Zealand.
Hamilton City Council could model this to New Zealand - (re-model this, in an existing building)
Architects have already spent over $100,000 for an arts inspired re-modelling of the Founders Theatre including 4 floors of 2500sqft for all arts to be practiced.
· Music and dance and performing arts,
· Painting and sculpture,
· Wood and metal works,
· Written arts, movie making and scripts, novelists, poetry, journalism and web design etc.
· A design centre for murals and art installations around the city.
A central governing building in the city that houses the National Collection of children’s art and visiting international children’s art exhibitions. That trains the co-ordinators for the after school art clubs around New Zealand.
Children holding festivals and markets on the lawns around this building, maybe a market every month selling their creations? A carnival could travel along the streets to Garden Place for music and dance.
There are schools in this city who have children from over 40 different countries in each school. Imagine the arts that are available to us to be shared? The cultures, the music, the concerts, on the lawn outside this central building. Children’s Art in the Park. Young people design a complete Children’s Art Park and build it, with mosaic pathways, magical gardens, water play and flying fox. (Already $4.5m budgeted for a children’s park there). We’re famous for our gardens. Let the children design one for themselves in the middle of the city. Plenty of accommodation for national and international visitors who will wander around the city looking at the children’s work and visit the exhibitions, plus a bus depot nearby.
A gift shop, café and advertising projected on the external walls, sponsorships and grants to cover costs plus children’s fundraising, passionate young people are mighty fundraisers, see the movie “Freedom Writers Diary”.
HCC Has $1.5m aside already for demolition and $4.5m for building a playground and paddling pool. That’s $6m towards a children’s art facility already.
Redesign the intersection if necessary and remodel the building. Invite benefactors to put in some more and let's redesign the future, the health, and relationships, of the Waikato through its children.
We could spend $10m to purchase 10 houses in 10 suburbs for the after school art clubs. These are houses for children only, not “community houses”. If the children in the club want to paint a fence or plant vege gardens they ask for guidance and materials. If they want to put on an exhibition or festival they ask for help to prepare food, whatever they want. It is their choice.
Properties ‘donated’ for children in every case in New Zealand in the last 30 years, have always been taken away again from the children. Citing the requirement of ‘market’ rent required on the building/property that has been repaired and improved by the children. Children are ‘rail-roaded’ at every turn by bureaucracy. This model has to be ‘rule-proof’. These buildings are as important as any church, museum or library.
Benefactors might supply orange containers at rural schools for art club spaces. Service clubs like Rotary might shuttle the highly motivated and gifted children to the central Founders Children’s Art House for the
· Waikato Children’s choir, break dancing, marching, brass band clubs
· science club
· pet club
· photography club
· philosophy group, and public speaking
· actors and performers club
· jewellery making and costume design
· Building, farming and taxidermy
· Sewing, stitching, weaving, felt and leather work clubs
Busy studios with many disciplines. School holiday programs, murals and public sculptures designed.
Shows, music, song and dance with a 500 seat capacity theatre and stage.
When was there last a public festival for children? If it is around sport there will be huge budgets for festivities, ie FIFA.
Parents
It is a crime that we have neglected our children for so long. Our mothers in this country would fiercely support, defend and guide their children, but who supports the mothers? The breakdown of children and crime, children and suicide, is “who supports the family”. A breakdown in the support of Plunket and Playcentres, and children’s access to the arts.
We need to take motherhood seriously again as we did when Playcentre (learn how your child learns) and Plunket (guidance for parenthood and child wellbeing) were set up in NZ. We were revered in the world for taking care of mothers/the family unit. Now, out of 41 EU and OECD countries, New Zealand ranks 35th in child wellbeing outcomes.
Pay parents to go to Playcentre instead of dropping children at daycare or no pre-school education, so parents and children learn, and receive valuable support from others that whanau desperately need.
Someone please buy fleets of cars for Plunket and sponsor more Plunket nurses, they have to travel in pairs to some places, but they make a difference.
Young mothers in Aotearoa commit suicide 7 times more often than mothers in the UK. Because we do NOT support mothers, children about how important they are. We do not support and protect young girls who from the age of 11 are having babies, who is giving them the choice to avoid pregnancy.
If we are to reach real peace in this world… we shall have to begin with children. - Mahatma Gandhi
Mobilization
Everyone thinks the ‘Government’ is funding and ‘fixing’ these things. Actually we have to mobilize ourselves.
We can’t keep waiting for the ‘lolly scramble” of election promises, of any government to address what we know to be possible. We have to help the ‘grass roots’ family organizations, Plunket and Playcentre, to help them develop skills.
We need to mobilize our great retired ‘workforce’ to mentor our young people. Our great young entrepreneurial brains to establish and share with children what is possible and provide spaces urgently for the immediate creation of safe, sacred Children’s Art Houses in every suburb in after school art clubs.
To this end, we propose the establishment of the Waikato Children’s Arts Council and the Aotearoa Children’s Arts Council.
We need a national governing support framework for children, like the NZ Children’s Art House Foundation. A university student could be employed to set this up for the Waikato as part of a degree perhaps.
With sensitive planning and the co-operation of other bodies, we must provide the greatest opportunity, the peer group. Growing a peace maker peer group who can mediate is essential allowing children’s voices to be heard.
Art is a peace making tool.
I was asked to assist the Nawton Community Constable in a school holiday program where we had local children paint a mural over a week. The constable said that some of these children may not still be alive at the end of the school holidays. Their friends are committing suicide every week. As young as 8 years old.
I tried asking Tainui to purchase a house that was for sale in Nawton so these children could meet after school and work quietly on individual or group projects.
The Children’s Art House model is proven to children, our talented young New Zealanders, establish a lifelong desire to contribute to society, enhance self-esteem and relieve despair.
There was a young teen woman on TV many years ago, in Opotiki, being interviewed about a car full of young people who had crashed and all were killed. The girl said that she could have been in that car with her friends, but she has learned that she “has a choice”. That young lady went to the Opotiki Children’s Art House. She learned through an art group, with her peers, with a co-ordinator, with a safe space, that her life is her choice.
Children’s Art Houses after school art clubs have to be free. Most Children’s Art Houses around NZ require the children to pay around $150 per term to fund the co-ordinator’s wage, overheads, and if they are lucky,they have minimal rent. Mostly run by an artist or teacher. There is one with a charitable trust that fully funds the centre and the building they are in, which is a classroom on the school grounds they lease from the school. Ideally the space is separate from the school. Another is in a community centre.
A Hamilton teacher says that one third of her class would go to an after school art club if it was nearby and affordable to explore their passions and ideas. There are 11,000 children in Hamilton aged from 8-12. That’s over 3,000 children who desperately would like to meet up with others who share their ideas and dreams. Ten percent of them are highly gifted and genius. How do we find and support them?
How does a 12 year old poet meet regularly (not online), with other young poets and song writers? A 14 year old boy broke his leg and on recovering in hospital was given a large piece of white paper. He said that was the first time anyone had ever given him a blank canvas and said ‘do what you would like’. A teacher on a school camp said there were children who had never walked in the mud in bare feet or felt the delight of peeling a vegetable. Experiences and opportunities are seriously needed.
The Children’s Art House after school art clubs have provided the safe place for hundreds of young people who are making their contribution around the world. Keisha Castle Hughes, James Rolleston, movie makers in Hollywood, architects, town planners, scientists, even international product innovations were developed in a Children’s Art House by our powerful young people. Sports men and women are held up in such high esteem in this country with huge funding for young sports people. We need the artists to be inspired and ‘housed’ in their arts ‘boot camps’. We need their innovations, designs, plans, that they are hiding, afraid to share and nowhere to develop, now more than ever.
A new model for New Zealand has to be built and we need to ask the children first and be prepared for their answers and mobilize our resources.
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales.
If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” – Albert Einstein
The Waikato Children’s Art Council and the Aotearoa Children’s Art Council are needed for powerful young people to declare what they want, meeting in groups talking about what they and their friends need.
We need the NZ Children’s Art House Foundations Director, Shona Hammond Boys to address Council, and all stakeholders on our children’s health, to imagine a new future for Aotearoa and put in child centered policies.
Shona was born in the Waikato and has travelled, studied and worked globally on children’s arts, being International President of the Asia Pacific Confederation for Arts Education. ASPACAE 1999-2001, receiving Queens Service Medal Award for services to Community, Arts and Children 2003 and USA Presidents Volunteer Service Award 2011. Awarded the International Child Art Foundation world children’s award for her services to children’s art across the globe. Shona’s brother Sir Grant Hammond lived in Hamilton and was highly supportive of the NZCAHF.
A gifted artist, talented pianist and dedicated to the future of New Zealand through empowering its youth, Shona now lives in Auckland and is available to assist the Waikato, her turangawaewae.
Our life is our greatest work of art.
It takes practice to develop our arts, gardening, mustering sheep, stacking wood, or architect, designer, screen writer etc. Some people never find their life’s art work. If your art is sport in New Zealand then you will be very likely to be assisted to practice and indeed excel in your art. If your art is web and IT, you might be picked up and go with it. Bored children from 8 – 14 must be given space and opportunity to explore to find their art. Our tamariki are our taonga.
Love Art, Be Kind
Carolyn Longden
www.theartofcolour/the art of children/blog
NZ Children’s Art House Foundation
Founder: Shona Hammond Boys QSM
