The White Elephant Trust

My name’s Dean Harliwich, I’m one of the trustees from the White Elephant Trust that was lucky enough to host the 2009 Youth Conference just past. If you’re too busy to read this just check out the line starting with “THE IMPORTANT BIT”, that’s good stuff. If you have a couple of minutes, please read on!

Firstly, thank you all for attending! I was lucky enough to be able to escape from work and drop in just before Jacinda showed up for her chat, and it was amazing to see the depth of consideration that went in to some of the topics you guys came up with. Some of you are no doubt looking forward to seeing the results of the conference – I can tell you that the write-up is on the go at the moment, and looks pretty exciting so far.

I’ll keep this short, because I know you all have things to do, so check it out:

One of the things that came up in the forum (as you know) was getting the word from youth to government, and back the other way.

I had a chat with Jacinda, and she’s got nothing but support for the development of some way of getting youth concerns to parliament, and parliament’s voice back the other way. Even better, she’s got a few other MPs who are keen to give their support to the same thing. Brendan Burns for one, is keen to be involved, and has his own little cohort of MPs who might be keen.

THE IMPORTANT BIT: The reason this is important is this: If we think there is a need for some kind of communication between youth and parliament, and that the current means of communication doesn’t make the grade, we’re the ones with the power to change that. I’m writing here to invite you to be a part of that change. In a nutshell, lets put our heads together at the end of the month and develop a way to empower youth to bring about change. We have the support of a range of MPs here, we definitely have the support of White Elephant, and we have an opportunity to contribute something that might change the way “youth” (and I include myself in that stereotype, is 21 too old to be cool?) interact with the rest of society.

That’s it in a nutshell. If you’re keen, please come along, bring anyone you like. Even if you don’t think you have anything to contribute and are just interested to see what it’s about, come and check it out. If nothing else it will be a good chance to fill up on soft drink and biscuits

Details for the venue are below, I look forward to meeting all of you properly!
dean[at]we.org.nz
027 2141767

ADDRESS:
White Elephant Trust
L1/1 Bedford Row – Find Dick Smith on Manchester St and you’ll find Bedford Row. We’re just above Dick Smiths, follow the White Elephants

WHEN:
5:00pm Thursday 25th of June. This can be adjusted if people can’t make it, but it’s a start. We’ll figure something out that works for everyone once we know who’s involved!

Been talking some more with MCD Architects and they are 95% through the plans, just a couple of engineers to talk to and we’ll have our plans submitted to CCC for building consent.  So I guess we’re getting to a critical stage where we’ll be starting the exciting task of DEMOLITION and then moving onto construction.  Anthony Wheeler has got the draft plans into Placemakers who are costing up the construction bits of it all.  Once we’ve got those back we’ll have an idea of what we don’t have lined up.  One of the big things we don’t know anyone in the industry is the air conditioning, so if you know someone in the aircon industry refer them onto our website!

On the fundraising side of things, we’ll be rolling out a bunch of iniatives over the next few weeks including an 0900 number for donations, a White Elephant Sale (sounds pretty obvious, why didn’t we do this earlier??) And taking on an idea of one of the founding Trustees Tom Cosm where we’ll be auctioning off space on each of our doors where your name can be forever engraved on that door!  More details to come….

WE-HQ OPEN NIGHT

We’ll be running an open night on Tuesday 24th March 6:00pm for anyone who wants to drop in and check out what we’re up to with the plans and see the space in its current form.  All welcome, bring your friends!!

We’ve also changed our weekly WE-HQ development meetings to Tuesdays 6pm @ WE-HQ (L1, 1 Bedford Row), so if you’re reading this and have something you’d like to contribute to our meeting in any way then pop on by!

Well I’ve just come back from a meeting with the MCD Architects who are working on the final version of the HQ plans to go into resource consent, and I’m quietly excited about the final changes we’ve made and what it will end up looking like!  Gordon Prier from the Christian Resource Centre has been working on the production studio designs to ensure we’re getting the best possible acoustics out of the space.

Then Anthony Wheeler and I met up with the lovely Tracey form the Christchurch Mail to have a quick chat and grab a photo for an article about the HQ developments.

If you were tuned into The Breeze last Friday at lunchtime, Anthony Wheeler called up in response to the youths in school uniforms being denied service at Shirley Burger King.  He spoke about the HQ developments and the host kindly read out some portions of this site and referred people onto here!

I’ll take this opportunity to thank Joel Pitt and Michelle Roberts who are the first to have kindly made donations to the project after our email-out last week. We’re off to a great start!

We’ve got our weekly WE-HQ development meeting on Wednesday 7:30pm @ WE-HQ (L1, 1 Bedford Row), so if you’re reading this and have something you’d like to contribute to our meeting in any way, please feel free to cruise along

Today, White Elephant is proud to release a double-sided flyer about Christchurch’s Youth Hub – WE-HQ. You can download a copy for yourself here White Elephant – HQ Developments

WE will start distributing these throughout the community in the coming weeks to any person or organisation who has an interest in helping out White Elephant and our plans for development the next few months

Stage 1 of the developments being the development of the core fitout of the space, is budgeted at $160,000.  White Elephant is now calling upon the community and local businesses to get in and support the concept.  We are looking for three basic things:

-          Donations and sponsorships in the form of cash
-          Donations and sponsorships in the form of materials and capital items
-          Volunteer time to assist with the demolition and building stages

More information about the HQ developments can be found here