Jeremy Padgett

Jeremy started Children Of The Sea in 2021, a hauora-based kaupapa Maori with the purpose of raising awareness for men’s mental health and promoting safety and knowledge when in the hands of Tangaroa.

“Our kaupapa hosts 25 tāne from all different rohe around Aotearoa. We reach out various Hauora Roopu including The Tane Matua movement, NZ medicine, Man up Programme and other Dive roopu offering this opportunity which really brings a diverse kete of knowledge from different iwi and creating a huge impact to our whakawhanaungatanga.

“During the planning stages of our kaupapa, we wananga fortnightly on the mainland which we prep, resource and fundraise for our trip. As this is a timely task we are only able to run our kaupapa every 3 months which gives us time to fundraise Koha and gather Kai for our trip. The cost of our trip to Kapiti Island Cost $3500 which covers our koha for accommodation, ferry across and Kai for our trip.

“Our kaupapa teaches te ao Maori , Manakitanga, whanaungatanga and Kotahitanga me ona tikanga. We have a wellbeing space which we run a hauora programme with our tane, enriching their capabilities as Pou with in their whanau. We also have a collective of knowledge in te Moananui a Kiwa which we share with our Tane teaching them the different safety and rescue technics when diving and the use of karakia and tikanga when diving into the realm of Tangaroa.”

What were the major outcomes of this kaupapa? 

We’ve been able to gain major momentum with Tapuwae Roa funding, which was a major limitation in making our kaupapa accessible to our people. It gave us and opportunity to think bigger, and with the stress relieved financially, we were able to focus on the quality of our delivery and outcomes which has been amazing.

Children of the Sea has really taking an amazing turn and has had a huge positive impact on our people this year. We’ve also created new relationships with other organisations and now look to open up the kaupapa to the wider iwi alongside them.

I think the greatest benefit we got out of our kaupapa was a sense of whanaungatanga. The connections made amongst the participants have been exceptional. Since the first trip to Kāpiti, which had 25 tāne in attendance, they have been staying in touch and actively connecting with each other on a daily basis which has lead to many micro haerenga and kai trips between our Children of the Sea kaupapa.

We also held space during and after ever kaupapa to gain feed back from our Rangatauanui which gave us amazing feed back and reassured us we were on the right path.

What were some of the challenges your kaupapa faced during its implementation?

Time was our biggest challenge as we could only run this kaupapa on the weekends. This meant a lot of the time some couldn’t make it because of other commitments and we tried to plan around this as best we could. Alongside time was the weather, which carried more challenges as we had to reschedule a couple times due to poor weather conditions. 

How did this kaupapa benefit from the Tonganui Scholarship? 

The funding truly helped make this kaupapa happen. It elevated the cost of travel, kai and accommodation which eased stress not only on us but our participants as we were able to make our kaupapa free to attend. 

What are your future plans for this kaupapa?

Everyone can’t get enough, and have already tried booking the next kaupapa! We plan to make this kaupapa sustainable and accessible to our people as we think the connection with our Taiao is most important to self discovery.