FORMER Kāwhia Primary School pupils Joseph and Teei Ikurere are enjoying the Outward Bound experience in Marlborough Sounds.
KĀWHIA twins Joseph and Teei Ikurere are spending a few weeks in Queen Charlotte Sound at the Anakiwa Outward Bound school. The twins are the latest of a number of young people from Kāwhia and the wider Ōtorohanga District to experience what Elle Freestone at the Ōtorohanga Employment Hub says is a truly life changing experience. One success is a young man who had left school believing he was destined to push trolleys at the supermarket. He’s now an apprentice mechanic, Elle said. “We’ve had other people in a job we’ve sent to outward bound with the consent of their employer, and they have come back and grown in their role or into a leadership role,” Elle said. “And these are all people who are under 23.” “One person we sent to his first job and he’d been there since he was 16, so we sent him away at 18 so he could look at where to next within his role. We use it as growth, the people we send – nine times out of 10 people don’t even know what Outward Bound is. “We’ve had to explain it, and where they are going and what they have been doing and show them a video. They go through an application and they go through a medical before they go.” For many it was their first experience of air travel and their first visit to the South Island. The employment hub sent a group of college students from among a group that worked at the meat works over the summer holidays. “We manged to send three that worked at TK Meats, and one from the college,” Elle said. Funding comes from the Mayors’ Task Force For Jobs, which enables the employment hub to pay for the course, travel and even kit the trainees in outdoor clothing before they leave. “We would love to send more people, we’ve sent the most of any mayor’s task force,” Elle said. “We always have someone tucked up our sleeve if there a last minute cancellation. They can call us and ‘look we’ve got this person’ and that’s cool. We are always prepared because it is really life changing, we just had so much success with that.” Young people interested can contact the employment hub for more information or check out the video on the employment hub’s facebook page. “Give us a call that would be great.”
