Kia ora e hoa,
TLDR; I’ve got a new newsletter here for things not specifically related to sign-up dates and reminders for Shoebox Christmas.
I really, really hope you’ve had a good break. And if you haven’t, I hope you have one coming up soon, because this year is going to be full on.
Election year means all political parties (and their mouthpieces) scrambling and shouting for your ear to convince you they’re here for you because you’re right, which means the ‘others’ are wrong.
You can probably already hear the divisive posts on their way to infect your feed. Remember this year’s strain comes with a (un) healthy dose of AI-enhanced misinformation and disinformation too.
The good news is, you know that togetherness and kotahitanga are the antidote to that pending pandemic of division. You know it because you’ve seen it - you helped prepare and administer it through Shoebox Christmas and our nationwide community here.
We both got to see the beautiful act of doors opening to community and kotahitanga over Christmas, and that connection to the bigger collective that happens.
Hopefully, you also saw some of the messages of thanks that came through while that door was open:
Whoever you are....we thank u you have made my 7 yo a very happy girl x from one solo mum to another we thank you!
From our whānau, especially myself as a māma I want to say a huge thank you for helping my wee girls’ Christmas be a brighter day. It’s been really hard reaching out as I feel very embarrassed asking for help, and knowing it’s Christmas is not all about presents under the tree, but who we have around it. I’m super grateful and will definitely pay this forward within my community.
I just wanted to give the biggest thanks and blessings to our xmas elves for blessing my son & mokos with their gifts 🥹 and for them to be able to open gifts this Christmas 🥹🥰 tears filled my eyes when I seen the courier boxes on my doorstep with our family name on them 🥹 from my whānau the biggest thank you to you all that were apart of blessing our whanau with gifts we are truly grateful.
Something that became clear over the last few years of looking after this movement of ours is that we’re a bit out of practice at kotahitanga and community. That shouldn’t be surprising when you look around at that culture and business influences we consider normal, but having had the privilege of being many generations deep in Otaki, where community is still how we roll - I hadn’t noticed it as much before.
Because of that and now that I’ve got Kaha Create up and running, I’m going to spend some time pulling together kōrero about what it means for us to be a community and to work together. Because I don’t think we can wait for the rest of the world to remember, regardless of your GDP or how many languages your car talks, we’re all just smart monkeys evolved to thrive in tribes and communities.
Since that and most of the other work I do for our communities between January - September doesn’t relate specifically to Shoebox Christmas, I’ve started a separate newsletter. Plus, I write a lot as I think through challenges related to communities, and I don’t want to clog up your inbox if you only want to hear from me once in the year to say Shoebox Christmas sign-ups are open.
If you’re interested in the stuff I do outside of Shoebox Christmas, follow this newsletter here (everything is free; paying subscribers is permanently switched off).
The new Newsletter is for kōrero other than the critical info for Shoebox Christmas.
Those of you who have been around a while might remember I tried to do this with a new section in the Shoebox Christmas newsletter but Substack (this newsletter platform) didn’t make it easy to separate them - now it lets me create a whole new newsletter with separated subscribers, so I can do it properly.
Hopefully, you know me well enough by now to understand a bit about the things I care about and what I’ll be sharing. The first post is here in case you want to be sure.
If I don’t see you over there, then I’ve just got one plea/hope for the time between now and our next Shoebox Christmas convo: please remember the more attention you invest in the things that really matter, the less you have for the things that don’t.
This year will bring a huge amount of clickbait, rage-bait, and temptation to scroll the comments… none of that is time well spent, and none of it will bring the things you care about to life.
Talk soon,
Pera
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