Great Start’s Project Sunshine teaches children around NZ about seeds, bees, and cross-pollinating communities 

Taita children, along with a delegation from the UN Youth Model UN Conference (see below), recently learned a lot about the importance of bees and what they can do to protect bee populations, and how they can use sunflowers to help not only bees but also their community.

A special event was created on 2 July as part of the national launch of “Project Sunshine”, an initiative of Great Start Taita’s Children’s Gardening Club. Taita children were joined by young people from all over New Zealand who were participating in the UN Youth Model United Nations. Their participation was an outreach programme, as part of the 2011 NZ Model UN conference, designed to promote the delegates as global citizens, and allow students to give back to the community and become involved to begin making changes.

The Project Sunshine launch took place at Great Start House Taita, which is gaining a ”reputation as one of the city’s most active and practical community centres” (Simon Edwards, Editor Hutt News , 17 May 2011).

The UN Youth arrived at The Great Start House in a big yellow bus and were fed a beautiful lunch, homemade, all produce from the Great Start garden.
All the children got down on the floor to work together to make up 'Project Sunshine Packs' for the Model UN delegates to take home. These contain information about the initiative, facts on bees and sunflowers, a guide to growing a project in your own community, an invitation to feed back and stay connected, and 2 packets of sunflower seeds – one packet supplied by Eco Seeds, the other were second generation seeds harvested from the Great Start Children’s Garden Club’s own sunflowers.

Location: Great Start, Taita.

Theme: Leading in and Leaderful.

Kids say the darnedest things. Quite often disarmingly frank, Great Start Taita has found that the mouths of babes can lead to local improvements that are relevant and effective. Not only that, having children involved throughout the project’s life teaches both them and the adults involved a thing or two about what it is to lead.

When 11 year old Kaisa Fa’atui from Taita, Lower Hutt said to the local Mayor at a meeting in 2009 “You have a hard job. Is it frustrating when your councillors don’t agree with you?” the room erupted in laughter. It was a spot on comment expressed sympathetically to an audience who were interested in listening to him.

Download the Learning Story as PDF

Location: Great Start, Taita.

Theme: Community Building

Growing community happens all the time. Mostly when we are not looking! In Taita, children have been growing community along with sunflowers.

H aving fun can be a great way of learning. Not only that but it can also be a really effective way to build connections to the environment and people around us. In Taita, children have been having fun planting sunflowers in less than beautiful spaces – on verges, along fences and in parks as well as back and front yards. Not surprisingly the sunflowers have been noticed by many people. So while the children have been learning a lot about how sunflowers grow, the importance of bees and what they can do to protect bee populations, they have also been learning how they can use sunflowers to help not only bees but also their community through the Bright Spot campaign.

Download Learning Story as PDF

Dominion Post "Your Weekend" supplement 10 December 2011 feature article:

• Kimberley Rothwell visits a garden in Taita and discovers that, thanks to Julia Milne, there's a community growing among the vegetables.

Read the article on Stuff