Living For Tomorrow…

It’s been more than a month now since we settled in at our temporary home, Movers & Shakers in Britomart. Since dropping anchor at these short-term digs, the Curative crew have managed to prove their adaptability by making home with fervour; hot water bottles and blankets, adorning the communal toilets with deluxe lavender-infused toiletries, even setting up home for our resident non-human friends – Jadado, the potato man and Lady Rainicorn, the Gender Neutral Piñata. 

In between, we’ve managed to squeeze in several shared lunches, cooked up by a rotating roster of Curative co-conspirators, the gastronomics emerging from the electric frying pan including fish finger sammies, crepes, an assortment of mexican grub and brimming-full bagel sandwiches. Movie nights in Movers & Shakers giant inflatable brain have been a frequent occurrence here too, the most recent being the 80s childhood classic The Land Before Time, which we enjoyed while snuggled up in bean bags in our finest onesies.

With all the shared lunches, movie nights and bounteous Britomart food options we’ve been having a ball with the Movers and Shakers crew, and it would be easy for us to get comfortable and decide to settle here forever. But we need to keep looking to the future and what tomorrow will bring. And most immediately for our small team it’ll be bringing two things.

We’re growing up fast and a big part of growing up is finding a place to call your own, so we’re excited to announce that we have done just that. Our search for a permanent home to house the Curative family is now all but over, and we can’t wait to tell you all about it (and maybe give you an internet tour) next month once we’re there. 

Another key part of growing up, surprisingly enough, is “growth” and that covers the second thing  tomorrow will be sending our way. We're looking for a new awesome person to become a part of the Curative crew. Since being welcomed into the Curative fam-bam, it’s been amazing experiencing these past several months, with all of us settling into this wee modern family, complete with siblings teasing and setting up mild pranks on one another. So it’ll be very exciting and a little nerve-wracking to welcome someone new into the fold, ushering in a new chapter for Curative in our permanent home. 

Despite popular belief, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows here at Curative. All of the lightness we create with our fun and games, is often a stark (and really necessary) contrast to the subject matter that we’re dealing with in our day-to-day doing. And we hope to bring some of our hope and light to the work that we do.

One project we’ve had the privilege to be a part of is ZEAL’s beautiful and incredibly powerful #LiveForTomorrow campaign. An effort to address the alarming rates of youth suicide, depression self harm and alcohol abuse, the online project is a collaboration with ZEAL, prominent R’n’B singer Pieter T and award-winning director Chris Graham, to provide a voice for youth struggling to find their way through dark times, encouraging them to ask for help, look to the future, and #LiveForTomorrow.

Curative worked alongside Zeal’s Social Marketing Collective, an amazing group of 15-18 year olds, to craft an online platform for the project and create a strong, identifiable brand and visual language for #LiveForTomorrow, something that can easily be taken and adapted by youth across social media to express their take on what it means to #LiveForTomorrow.

Words can’t express how deeply moved we were by the bravery of those featured in Pieter T’s Music video/mini documentary, and we’re super proud to have been a part of this initiative. The video (below), launched last week, is well worth a watch, as are the mini-documentaries that accompany it, taking a more in depth look at the stories of Levi and Richie.

Follow #LiveForTomorrow on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram, share what #LiveForTomorrow means to you and keep an eye out for Phase Two, which will be announced on the 1st of September.

Another exciting piece of work we did this month was a stop-motion video for the Global Citizen Concert to launch this year’s Live Below the Line campaign. Crouching on the ground in a small room with Sam while carefully crafting letters out of rice, then blasting it with a blower in between fits of hysterics, definitely made for an entertaining day at work.

The video was projected during the concert, in between incredible Kiwi acts such as Anika Moa, Tiki Taane, Jamie McDell, Seth Haapu, Ahoribuzz and more. There were also several inspiring advocates against extreme poverty speaking in between musical acts. We all got our boogie shoes on that evening, and it was the perfect way to end my birthday weekend too. 

Being able to do meaningful work like this together really makes me feel all warm and gooey inside, knowing that we’re doing our bit of good today to make the world a better place tomorrow. I guess that idea is something that motivates and informs all of our decisions at Curative, especially in this period of movement, change and growth. In fact we have a quote sitting on one of our desks, which acts as a handy reminder. 

Every day we’re working towards creating a better tomorrow, and we’re incredibly lucky that we get to do this as our job. That’s what Living For Tomorrow means for us. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Peace out Homies

Meghan (& Kaan)

P.S. Jade and Eddy will be running a few workshops on Social Media and Digital Communications over the next few months with North Shore Community and Social Services. The first will be on 24th September at the Waiheke Adult Learning Centre, the second on the 5th November at the Mary Thomas Centre in Takapuna. Check them out if you have a chance!

How much change can you make for $2.25?

A lot more when you pool your resources and work together.

How big a part does food play in your life? It’s not something we think about too much, since we have such easy access to it. But last week we came to appreciate how much food is built into our daily schedules.

Catch up with a friend? Grab lunch at a local cafe. Client meeting? Coffee and Tea please. Struggling to get through the mid-afternoon doldrums? Sugary snack to jumpstart the brain. Need to wind down after work? Glass of red.

Take those away and life start to get a little less fun. Then drastically cut your daily food intake and your ability to function becomes severely impaired. How do we know this? Well we, alongside 1400 other Kiwis, were Living Below the Line for a week, in an effort to raise awareness and funds around the global problem of extreme poverty.

Our involvement with the campaign started back in June when we helped Will and Patrick from the Global Poverty Project launch this years New Zealand Live Below the Line challenge; a campaign that has managed to get eight of the major aid organisations within New Zealand to collaborate, no mean feat.

After being immersed in the cause at the time of launch, we knew that we had to take the challenge ourselves, and live below the international extreme poverty line, on just $2.25 a day, for 5 days.  

Living on such a small amount is all but inconceivable for those of us lucky enough to be born in the Western world, but for 1.4 Billion people around the world it’s their reality. They have to survive on that tiny budget, using it to pay for not just their food but also clean water, healthcare, education, shelter, everything! The aim of the campaign is to bring an end to this extreme poverty within a generation, to help those most in need to break out of the cycle that they’ve been born into.

Now lets be clear, this challenge in no way comes close to replicating the realities of those living below the poverty line, but it did give us valuable insight into some of the day to day struggles.  

We knew it was going to be hard; that it was very likely that we would be hungry, grumpy, and sluggish. But we also knew as a team of three we could pool our resources, and lean on each for support (something that proved invaluable as we made our way through the week).

We created a very detailed daily plan for our meals, and tried to make sure that each meal was as filling as possible. We were never in danger of starving, but our struggles would be mental. Eating had to become more about survival, rather than enjoyment. Our meals, while in no way unpleasant, wouldn’t be particularly inspiring, but they would give us what we needed. We would have to deal with the fact we couldn’t just grab a snack when our stomachs rumbled, or sip a cup of tea for refreshment.

But we had no idea of the toll it would take on our workloads. The smaller portions paired with lack of sugar, coffee, and tea clouded our thoughts, slowed our responses and gave us splitting headaches.

Food also took up a whole lot more headspace than we expected. With such a strict budget, we couldn’t just grab something as we ran out the door. We had to make time to prepare and eat each of the three meals everyday. And much of the week was occupied just thinking about food too. Despite realising early on, talking about things we couldn’t have was tortuous, we couldn’t seem to help ourselves, and many of our conversations centered around that which we could not have.

As much as we complained last week, we were always brought back to reality by the fact that this is just a small taste of what life is like for a large portion of the worlds population. It’s a sobering perspective.

We finished the week with a renewed appreciation for the amount of choice we have when it comes to food, the ease of access to it, and how much we depend on it to help us get through the day.

And the challenge has proven to us once again how valuable it is to have a supportive network around you, to push you forward, help you out and bolster your efforts. Last week 1400 New Zealanders came together to let people know extreme poverty is something we can bring to an end, raising over $300,000 while we were at it.

There’s strength in numbers, and by simply working together and sharing resources, seemingly insurmountable challenges can become a lot more manageable, whether it be surviving on a tiny budget, or bringing an end to a global crisis.

The animated video that Curative’s lead crafter Kaan, produced to tell the story of Live Below The Line.