General manager of the Halogen Foundation – an organisation dedicated to fostering youth leadership. Its flagship events are the National Young Leaders’ Days which run throughout New Zealand for primary/intermediate and secondary school students. Fale was awarded Sir Peter Blake Emerging Leader Award last year for her commitment to fostering youth leadership.
How would you describe the New Zealand identity?
Defining national identity is not that simple. New Zealand is diverse nation, made up of many cultural groups, with many different customs and traditions. While people may describe themselves as “New Zealanders”, how they define their “New Zealand-ness” will vary from person to person. For example, some people might see New Zealand identity in aspects of New Zealand history or in New Zealand achievements in sporting, artistic or other endeavours, while others might see it through sense of national characteristics or traits, or through national symbols and icons. Maori culture may form one aspect of national identity, since it is both unique to New Zealand and part of our identity in the outside world. I believe though as New Zealanders we share strong national identity and have great sense of belonging and value cultural diversity.
What will be our next major challenge?
Fostering great leadership amongst our young people. It’s sad that as part of our daily news we are hearing about so many murderers, suicides, youth gangs, crimes and large majority of it has to do with young people between the ages of 11-18 years. It’s almost like we have become complacent with hearing these statistics. I know there are lot of organisations working together trying to work out ways of combating this, but it’s important we continue to build safe and healthy environment for this generation and the next generation of leaders to follow.
What do we need to do to prepare ourselves for this?
We have to continue to build confidence and sense of possibility in our current young leaders today. lot of the students that attend our events are so capable of great things but it’s so important that they keep the purpose of what they are doing and wanting to achieve as key focus on their leadership journey. It’s so easy to get misdirected and our efforts become mediocre.
