One of the best moments of our year is the opportunity to celebrate the successes of our young people. There have been different expressions of our graduation celebrations over the years, and mostly they have been driven independently by each programme.

This year we pivoted on a thought that we might create a single graduation celebration acknowledging the success of our rangatahi.

This is an opportunity to showcase the achievements of our young people alongside whānau and community. We also get to share these successes with the organisations that support the delivery and content of the programmes we provide.

10 students completed their Duke of Edinburgh Bronze Awards and 1 of these students concurrently achieved the Silver Award.

6 students completed a Level 2 NZQA certificate in Foundation Skills. It's the first time we have accessed this qualification since COVID had an affect on funding.

Auckland Challenge & Arise Academy have been major contributors to the successful outcomes these young people have achieved. Thank you for your support. We will continue to fight hard together in this space to ensure young people have access to the amazing opportunities you provide through your organisations.

Watch out 2025 end of year celebrations, we are coming for you!

Over our past few updates we've included stories of our partnership with Arise Academy Te Puna Whakatika here in Warkworth.

Arise's wonderful tutor, Jos, has worked with some of our young people to achieve their Level 2 Foundations qualification. For young people who have been out of school for varying lengths of time, stepping back into studying can be a big challenge to face.

Reviewing the data of this programme, it's been very impressive to see the progress in our young people's foundational skills. Arise Academy uses the Literacy and Numeracy Assessment Tool (LNAAT) as a diagnostic tool for our learners. Our learners were tested at both the beginning and the end of the programme.

In literacy, the graphs below (for two of our students) show a substantial shift between the pre- and post-programme test scores with no overlap in the interquartile ranges. This indicates that the improvement in score is meaningful and unlikely to have occurred by chance.

86% achieved a statistically significant progression. All learners who achieved these progressions were Māori or Pasifika females.

In numeracy, we saw similar results:

Our students worked really hard. Their commitment, supported and encouraged by Jos and the team at Arise Academy, has seen them start to write new stories about themselves.

A few weeks ago this cohort had a graduation dinner to celebrate their achievements. Our wonderful friends at Sky City generously supported this dinner, and the girls had a wonderful night at Fortuna Restaurant (thanks, Sky City Foundation!).

It's really important to us that we take every opportunity to celebrate our kids. Seeing them move past challenges and internal barriers to learning, to achieve qualifications is one of the many reasons we do what we do. However, even more than that, it's seeing them feel proud of themselves, experiencing "I did it!" moments, and enjoying the pleasure of hard work paying off.

Nicole (Arise Academy), Aaliyah (Graduate), Madi (Springboard Youth Coach), Jos (Arise Academy), Destiny (Graduate) & Sade (Graduate).

James and his sister, Georgia, joined our Impact Alternative Education at Springboard just over a year ago. They had been out of school for some time due to their mum’s health, and their living in a rural location.

Over this last year, James has impressed us with his ever-increasing courage to take on challenges and opportunities to grow. Last year, one of the challenges we gave our Impact crew was to complete a treetop-walk.  “It was quite scary, but I’m proud of completing it, and the second time I knew what it was like so I could have a bit more fun”.

When we asked James for his “go-to” reaction to going on adventures like treetop walks, surfing or rafting, he said his response is normally: “NAH!! That’s it. And then sometimes I walk away, haha”.

Every year Impact go on a camp in Rotorua. It forms part of their "adventurous journey" achievement for Duke of Edinburgh Awards, and is a great way to get our kids off site and into some new experiences like white water rafting. We asked James about how he enjoyed camp. “Camp is pretty fun. It’s not scary to me”, but on the subject of white water rafting: “Scary! I didn’t want to do it”.

You can see James did do it - he's at the back right of the raft. So how did he move from "I didn't want to" to getting on the boat?

“At the start of joining Impact it was quite hard because I was shy, but now it’s allgooods. I’ve made some really good friends. In the lead up to rafting the others were always positive and encouraged me; ‘you got this, bro!’  This year I felt more comfortable with the tutors and everyone, so I just did it.”

Impact tutor, Togan, says "For James, the thing that has really made the difference is the friendships. He has friends around him who support and encourage him. We recently went swimming, which James has not ever been keen on, but he went so far out in the ocean because he had other Impact kids beside him teaching him how to swim and continually saying "we're here, we won't leave you".

James recognises the courage those relationships bring. “I’ve learned that pushing myself out of my comfort zones is sometimes good. I’ve also learned how much support I have from everyone in Impact and the friendships we have. I’m glad we got the opportunity to come to Springboard. I’ve tried so many new things and these people I didn’t want to talk to are now my friends”.

"We know these friendships really bring such an incredible support network to our kids lives", continues Togan. "We know that when they are not here [onsite at Springboard] they are texting each other to check in and make sure everyone is ok. The friendships are key. For the whitewater rafting, Jase, Josh and I had been talking to James for months, (months!), to help him prepare for it, but he was always on the fence during those conversations. When it came down to it, it was the support of the other kids that actually made the difference."