Telling the Mahi Whakaara story
Telling the Mahi Whakaara story - What is it? Who is it for?
Come and read this story…..Mahi Whakaara arose out of a passion by a small group of a committed few to growing Maori people. In this case growing young Maori people aged 15-24 from learning skills and knowledge that will help them work in a trade, or how to get to uni or just how to do their mana Maori mahi like korero about them, sing a waiata, or memorise a karakia. In this way Mahi Whakaara fosters the ‘growing of skills and knowledge’ as its sponsoring organisation Te Tautoko Ora Foundation Incorporated Charitable Trust aims to achieve. You can see in the designs below the big one being our Te Tautoko Ora tohu (emblem) and the other for our Mahi Whakaara.
The mechanics of Mahi Whakaara...
But then creating a programme to enable young people to learn skills and knowledge about stuff…is not as easy as one would think. In fact it takes time, money, people and resources to get a programme together let alone considering how the students will learn what they will learn. For Mahi Whakaara, there’s some complexity to get through like designing a website that tells people about the programme, developing a student information system that tells us about who is going to learn our programme and all the info needed for enrolling the trainee AND thats before they start. Once they start there is data to capture that helps us track the students learning progress, there’s the tutor’s input about how well the students are building their knowledge of a trade or programme and maintaining that with careful and considerate management supporting the trainees, tutors and staff.
Working for the results....
and then there’s the fun part…..working to inspire, inspiring to work on the tauira (students). Taking the tauira through their steps of the 3 trades courses in -building – painting – forestry and the other two support programmes of Te Ao Maori and Foundation Tertiary Learning. Yup…the fun part, here’s where the tauira get to be with the Matua (tutors) who will share their knowledge with them using tools, learning techniques and methods related to each trade. Even the learning of a waiata, a song, or a karakia is part of this programme so that tauira can leave us knowing more about themselves as Maori…even going on cultural trips for their programmes to learn about the history of where they live….yup fun stuff…