Last year I joined the Board for Oke Charity, an inspiring organisation that create outdoor classrooms for schools in Aotearoa New Zealand. I hadn’t heard of Oke before I saw the board role but the more I read, the more I wanted to get involved. 

Oke was founded by Paul Dickson, who you might recognize from the current season of The Great Kiwi Bake Off. Together with the Oke team they’ve funded and built 37 school gardens in Auckland and Waikato since 2016. These gardens produce over 1,000kgs of food each year and give 21,784 kids the opportunity to learn how to grow kai in outdoor classrooms.  

There are so many benefits of having gardens in schools. Here’s just a few I’ve observed: 

Community 

Fund raising, building, and running a school garden brings communities together. It takes a huge amount of effort, but that effort teaches our tamariki (kids) the value of the garden, to respect it and look after it. Which ultimately becomes a source of pride for them in their school community.  

Independence 

In planting seeds, nurturing seedlings and eventually harvesting and eating kai from school gardens, kids learning where food comes from. I’ve seen this for myself with my kids in our home garden – while it can be a struggle to get them to eat vegetables off their plate, they’ll happily pluck and munch on veggies straight from the garden. The best thing too is that kids with school gardens are influencing what happens in their homes.

Freedom 

I was a kid that loved school and loved learning in a classroom. Mark wasn’t. He’s the most motivated learner I’ve ever met but he never felt comfortable in a traditional classroom. I absolutely love that Oke creates space for kids who don’t learn well inside to have the freedom to learn in the way that comes naturally to them.  

I’m so pumped to help Oke scale access to outdoor classrooms to kids all over Aotearoa New Zealand. We’ve got big goals, and we’ll need lots of help.  

Want to get involved? You can: 

Donate – we fundraise hard so that schools don’t pay a cent when we come and build their gardens. Whatever you can give to support this kaupapa will help build outdoor classrooms. 

Volunteer – check out the upcoming working bees here. 

Partner – if you know any businesses who would be keen to get behind Oke’s mission to grow mighty kids please let me know.  

Currently the school gardens Oke has built give 1% of Kiwi kids access to an outdoor classroom. We’re on a mission to scale that to 10% by 2030.