Celebrating ‘Peace & Diversity’ Week at MRGS: 3rd August- 7th August
With our Covid environment, our ‘Peace and Diversity’ 17th International Peace Week has been even more important than ever before.
Bringing people together as human beings fighting against a deadly virus, uniting together… no matter what culture, race, sexual orientation, gender, disability or any other difference, we need to work together, challenging inequity, racism, prejudice, division, shame or blame.
At Roskill we believe in the important values of manaakitanga, whanaungatanga, and Tūmanakotnaga demonstrating and standing for equality, equity, kindness, inclusion, respect, peace and hope for all.
We continue to ‘walk the talk’ and that’s exactly what the Mediators and MRGS did during Peace Week!
The Mediators organised a number of exciting activities throughout the week:
Random acts of kindness; peace quote competitions; face painting; peace badge making; peace rock painting and the wearing of white ribbons for peace.
Our banners highlighting the importance of embracing “ Diversity” & standing for “Black Lives Matter” were particularly amazing this year. As well as our gorgeous Diversity t-shirts designed by Mr.Carter.
- On Monday we had Peace Foundation’s Youth Peace Ambassador Tamkeen Saeid run a workshop on “Hope for the Future”.
- On Tuesday we had face painting, rock painting and badge making in the Quad.
- Wednesday was “ Embracing Diversity & Anti- Violence Day” where the Library was full of informational stalls from agencies like Rainbow Fale, Fonua Ola, RPE, Youthlaw and the Puketapapa Youth Council. We also had our amazing student led stalls on ‘Violence is not ok campaign’; SHINE, NETSAFE, PSSP, Amnesty, Live4Tomorrow, BILS, SYNC, Skittles and our peace crane makers.
- On Thursday we had a sausage sizzle (including vegetarian and halal sausages) raising funds for our Roskill families affected by Covid. We raised $780 from the sales of our sausages and tshirts. Our heartfelt thanks and gratitude goes to Nick Tuialii and his Team who have been providing food hampers and other necessities to our Mt Roskill families since before the first Lockdown.
- On Friday, we had our joyous Peace march around the Roskill community chanting for peace and social action.
We cannot thank the Mediators enough for their social justice leadership, respectful collaboration, creativity and determination in working for Rangimarie and Aroha at MRGS.
Kia tau tō rangimārie
Ki runga i ngā iwi o te ao
Let our peace reign
On all the people of the world
