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January 06, 2015
Advisory group brings youthful eyes to museum
Waatea Team
Posted On January 6, 2015
Auckland War Memorial Museum is hoping for an infusion of youthful energy with the formation of a Youth Advisory Group.
It’s part of a long term strategy looking at what needs to change over the next 20 years.
Museum Youth Outreach Programmer Bethany Edmunds says the aim of the group is to extend the Museum’s engagement with an ethnically diverse youth audience by giving them the opportunity to assist the Museum in delivering content relevant to them.
"The aim is to create opportunities for them to engage across the whole Museum, including policy development, new exhibitions, programmes specifically for a youth audience, collections and digital," she says.
The seven members of the group have been selected as a result of their demonstrated youth leadership, academic achievement, and participation in anything from the creative industries to science, human history, media and communications.
They include 19-year-old AUT University communications student Arizona Leger and 23-year-old graphic designer Hana Maihi.
Ms Leger, who has Maori, Samoan, Tongan and European whakapapa, was the Epsom Girls Grammar head girl in 2013, a participant in the Navigating Spaces spoken word poetry group for Urbanlife 2012, and a guest speaker for the 2013 TEDxYOUTH event.
Ms Maihi, who is employed by her iwi Ngati Whatua ki Orakei as the kaitiaki Kaimahi Toi, was the first intern in the museum’s Urbanlife programme, doing all of the graphic ID and exhibition content for the programme in 2012.
The other members are filmmaker Elspeth Carrol, NCEA Campus founder Jade Leung, software designer Christian Silver, poet and law student Zach Soakai and dancer and spoken word artists Jahra 'Rager' Wasasala.
Copyright © 2015, UMA Broadcasting Ltd: www.waateanews.com
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