EHF featuring at Festival for the Future
Coming up next weekend in Auckland is New Zealand’s biggest gathering of social entrepreneurs, changemakers and young people who desire a better world.
Festival for the Future (FFTF) is in its 7th year running, and has grown from a small gathering of about 100 people in 2011, to expecting over 1,200 participants this year. Run by Inspiring Stories, the 3-day festival attracts high profile local and international speakers, each of whom is doing incredible work to build a fair, just and sustainable world where everyone thrives.
This year our Edmund Hillary Fellowship (EHF) co-founder and CEO Yoseph Ayele is one of the guest speakers. Yoseph recently joined Lisa King and Fatumata Bah in a Radio NZ interview, where they chatted with Wallace Chapman on the positive benefits of immigration and the initiatives they are leading to help New Zealanders reach their potential.
Listen to Radio NZ interview:
Lisa King started a social enterprise 2 years ago called Eat My Lunch. The startup takes the Toms shoes buy-one-give-one-away model and applies it to healthy, nourishing packed lunches. Each lunch purchased by busy workers and delivered to the workplace, funds a free lunch given away to one of the thousands of Kiwi kids who go to school hungry every day. With a for-profit business model, Eat My Lunch took just 6 months to break even, is now commercially sustainable, and has still managed to give away over 475,000 free lunches to kids in need. An inspiring model!
Fatumata Bah was born in Sierra Leone and moved to New Zealand when she was very young. After going back to visit recently, she noticed the huge levels in gender equality. Coming back to New Zealand, she noticed that while the magnitude to which women are disadvantaged is considerably less, many of the same underlying patterns of behaviours and belief systems pervade our culture and disadvantage women. She is now committed to helping women all over the world achieve their potential and break through glass ceilings, with her new Mana Wahine programme.
This is not the first time that Yoseph has featured as a guest speaker at FFTF. At the 2014 festival, he spoke about building solutions that can scale. When Yoseph first appeared at at this event, EHF was little more than the seed of an idea behind developing New Zealand as an incubation nation for solving complex global problems. Yet building solutions that scale is a is a key premise upon which EHF has been built. Our tagline Base Camp for a Better World is grounded in the idea that New Zealand can be the starting point from which impact-driven entrepreneurs, investors and teams can reach new heights and strive for the seemingly impossible.
Building ventures, projects and businesses that solve a problem locally is a great start, but if we are to see the large-scale transformative changes that the world needs to avoid catastrophic climate change, disruptions to our food production systems, increasing inequality, political instability, loss of species, and many of the other challenges we are facing, we need to work together to build solutions that can applied globally, and we need to do it fast. We invite you to join us!
Are you a visionary entrepreneur or investor building solutions to global challenges? You can bring your vision to reality from New Zealand by joining the Edmund Hillary Fellowship community. Apply here.
