Hello everyone! I’m thrilled to announce that I have been selected for Season 2 of the Blackbird Foundation‘s Protostars Microgrants. Protostars is a grant program and accelerator that offers $1000 grants to young creatives in New Zealand and Australia, along with an engaging weekly programme and networking platforms.
Recap of Protostars Season 1
I was super fortunate to be part of the Season 1 Protostars cohort, and used the grant to kick-start the setup costs of my self-published children’s poetry book, What Are You Made Of? Other projects powered by the programme included children’s plays, huggable robots, and a variety of fantastic blogs and podcasts. These were all presented on an interactive website at the end of the programme, which you can find here.
The programme was also instrumental in motivating me to start my poetry Instagram, and eventually this website!
At the end of the day, though, the best thing I took out of Protostars was a sense of awe at the astounding projects run by other Australasian youth my age, and a sense of continuing desire to create, explore, and inspire in turn.
Plans for Blackbird Protostars Season 2
My Season 2 grant proposal was for developing and delivering a children’s poetry workshop to give at primary schools around New Zealand. For want of a better title, I am calling them “WAYMO Workshops” (WAYMO being an acronym for my book’s title).
I’ve been both the facilitator and the attendee of many a poetry workshop at the University of Auckland, and I’ve also been part of the Teddy Bear Hospital, an initative where medical students visit kindergartens to “treat” children’s teddies (via toy stethoscopes, blood pressure cuffs, and a LOT of plasters) with the aim of fostering trust in health professionals — “if we can fix your teddy, your doctor can fix you when you’re sick too!” I hope to meld these experiences into a children’s poetry workshop experience to start inspiring the future’s young poets to write, write, write.
Workshops will include poetry readings, discussions on the meaning of poetry, and group activities to get kids’ creative smoothies flowing. I have found that group poetry is a great way for people to get introduced to poetry — when you know you only have to write one line, things suddenly look a lot less daunting.
Examples of group poems I’ve been involved with facilitating:
The grant will help me to provide resources, transport to and from schools, and run a small competition for pupils to enter and win stationery, book vouchers, and copies of What Are You Made Of? By incentivising children to write a poem, any poem,
If you are a New Zealand school teacher or librarian wanting to organise a workshop, email me at [email protected]. I’d love to visit!
Keen to hear more about Protostars?
Read the official Blackbird Protostars Season 2 announcement and see what my fellow Protostars are getting up to on Substack and Twitter.
To follow along with the participants’ highlights during the programme, follow the Blackbird Foundation on on Twitter, Instagram and subscribe to their Substack.
Lastly, do check out my Instagram account, where I will be sharing project updates to my story, along with poetry and blog posts!