This year marked the 10th Anniversary of The South Auckland Poets Collective (SAPC). The members of SAPC are the coaches, mentors and facilitators of our programmes. It is a difficult thing to discern where SAPC ends and Action Education begins, both bodies are inextricably linked and are symbiotic in nature. 

We give huge thanks to Auckland City Libraries who this year have archived our works and supported us to celebrate this in style. This included a heritage talk, a 3-night show directed by Grace Taylor and supported by Creative New Zealand and an exhibition as part of the Auckland Arts Festival at the Mangere Arts Centre.

Action Education and SAPC have woven a rich history together over the last decade and have had a huge impact on the communities and young people we have worked with, this became increasingly clear as the anniversary came together.

​10 years ago Youth Workers, poets and friends Ramon Narayan, Grace Taylor and Daren Kamali had an idea. Through poetry they had each experienced the ability to break down barriers and engage with young people, with spoken word they had stumbled onto a medium that would lead to one of the most powerful tools of youth engagement and self-expression in Aotearoa.

Over the years the kaupapa alignment of Action Education and SAPC has become clear, and as Ramon says, it is hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. The current members of the Collective are coaches, mentors and educators for all of Action Education’s current programmes.
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SAPC is a creative home to nurture outstanding talents, who are then equipped to give back to the next generation of artists through Action Education.

The South Auckland Poets Collective paved the way for the possibility of Stand Up Poetry, WORD – The Front Line, and so many events and programmes that Action Education uses to provide  pportunities for young people to develop and express their inherent creativity.

“South Auckland Poets Collective has grown the art of poetry slam, pedagogy and emerging and youth performers and writers in leaps and bounds over the last decade in New Zealand, especially from its humble beginnings in South Auckland,” says co-founder Daren Kamali who now works as a Senior Curator for Auckland Libraries.

“I want to acknowledge the role of Youthline and Action Education over the last 10 years for establishing 32 young poets and also being instrumental in working and keeping SAPC together with outreach work into our communities, nationwide and across the Tasman.”

​The support of Auckland Libraries to record and celebrate 10 years of the South Auckland Poets Collective has been an incredible way to validate the impact this small group of committed artists and community organisers has had.

“Celebrating 10 years of South Auckland Poets Collective is celebrating contemporary oral storytelling known as spoken word poetry in Aotearoa,” says co-founder Grace Taylor.

“I am so proud of the ripple effects the Collective have had for both young people and the artform as a whole. The thing I am most proud of is empowerment of young people to tell their own stories.”

​​In July 2019, Ngā Hine Pūkōrero, a group of four Rangatahi Maori poets, made history by competing at the 2019 Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam in Las Vegas, USA. They were the first team from Australasia to ever compete in the festival, the largest of its kind in the world with over 500 young poets in attendance. They finished between 9th and 11th out of 50 teams, farther than any international team in its first year of competition, and earned the chance to share their work on the Finals stage in front of the entire BNV community.

As the first NZ poets to attend Brave New Voices they were tasked with the unique challenge of sharing stories and language that many of the other participants may not be familiar with. In order to bring their true stories to BNV, and the United States, they not only had to be poets but also historians and cultural ambassadors, something that most other teams never had to consider.

They covered topics such as land rights, domestic abuse within Aotearoa, language reclamation, gun violence and the Christchurch terror attacks, the power of indigenous women’s voices, colonisation, Captain Cook and the Dawn Raids.

While visiting the United States, Ngā Hine Pūkōrero were the featured artists at Da Poetry Lounge, the largest weekly poetry event in the United States which draws over 300 audience members to historic Greenway Court Theatre in Hollywood California.

The team spent more than 186 hours rehearsing, including a facilitation role at our annual Slam Camp where they worked on material for the competition and provided inspiration to the next generation of WORD - The Front Line participants, who were thrilled that a local team were going to represent ‘them’ on the world stage.

During the Brave New Voices competition, Ngā Hine Pūkōrero shared their stories with more than 4,500 live audience members and a further 122,000 viewers through Facebook Live.