Source: – Press Release/Statement:
Headline: Using sports passion for good
How to take public passion for something and focus it on a pressing issue? Collab chats with John Wroe, co-founder and CEO of Street Child United, which amongst other things runs an international tournament uniting teams of street children to play football and call for their rights to be realised. Hear John’s origin story about the NFP and his tips for working with sports stars, other celebs and funders.
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Source: NordVPN
Consumers are being tricked into paying upfront fees for non-existent prizes –cybersecurity experts share how to spot and avoid these growing scams
More and more people are falling for fake prize scams, where scammers trick them into thinking they’ve won big in a lottery, sweepstakes, or contest they never entered. These fraudsters play on excitement, promising life-changing prizes – only to ask for upfront payments for supposed taxes or fees.
Once the money is sent, the scammers disappear, leaving victims empty-handed and out of pocket. It’s a growing problem, and experts warn us to stay alert to avoid becoming the next target.
“The scammers behind these fake prize schemes are sophisticated, often using personal information to make the scams appear more believable. The emotional effect of ‘winning’ a big prize only makes it harder for people to think critically,” says Adrianus Warmenhoven, a cybersecurity expert at NordVPN. (ref. https://nordvpn.com )
The hidden dangers of prize scams
While these scams might seem obvious, fraudsters are constantly evolving their tactics. Scam attempts can be extremely convincing, with phony calls, emails, and even fake websites designed to deceive victims into providing their personal information and making payments.
In 2024, prize scams were the most commonly reported fraud in the US, making up 38.27% of all scam reports, according to the National Consumers League. Also, the Federal Trade Commission reported that in 2023 alone, consumers lost $301 million to lottery and prize scams, with an average loss of $907 per person. These numbers highlight the ongoing impact of prize-related fraud.
“Scammers use a variety of tactics to make their scam seem real, including spoofing caller IDs, sending counterfeit documents, and creating fake websites that mimic legitimate lottery organizations. They know how to play on human emotions,” explains Warmenhoven.
Spotting the red flags of fake prize scams
To protect yourself from falling victim to prize scams, Warmenhoven urges everyone to watch out for these common warning signs:
Unexpected prize notices: If you didn’t enter a contest or lottery, it’s a scam.
Upfront payment requests: Legitimate organizations don’t ask for money upfront to claim a prize.
Pressure tactics: Scammers often create a sense of urgency, threatening that you’ll lose your “winnings” if you don’t act immediately.
Too good to be true: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Protecting yourself from prize scams
Adrianus Warmenhoven emphasizes the importance of staying vigilant and skeptical when receiving unsolicited communication about prize winnings. “Always verify the organization’s legitimacy and never share personal information, such as bank account details or Social Security numbers, over the phone or online unless you’re absolutely sure the source is trustworthy.”
It is recommended to remember that if you didn’t enter a lottery or sweepstakes, you didn’t win. The best defense against these scams is awareness. If you have any doubts, contact the supposed prize issuer directly through official channels, and never provide personal information unless you’re sure it’s real.
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In the last eight months, more than 100 new, warm, dry state homes have been added to our portfolio in Napier.
These homes are changing the lives of the people who are moving into them. Sixty whānau have been able to move out of emergency accommodation including 100 children who are no longer growing up in motels.
In the last four years, we have built 270 new Napier homes, says Regional Director East North Island Naomi Whitewood (Ngāti Porou, Ngāpuhi). “We have another 55 homes in construction that are expected to be completed in the next three months.”
“A development of 13 homes has just been finished. Like every new home we complete, these ones were blessed by local kaikarakia before they are occupied. The people who are moving into the homes are invited to the blessing. Meeting these whānau is always a heartwarming occasion. I can see how desperate many peoples’ living situation has been and what a difference having a long-term suitable home makes to build their future around.”
The moment Chris opened the door to his new home was very emotional.
One of these people whose life has changed is Chris. He recently moved into one of the new homes in Onekawa after five years living in temporary housing.
I feel like I have always been on the move, says Chris. “As a child living with my dad, we moved 10 times. Since I moved into emergency housing five years ago, I have moved seven times around different motels. I am looking forward to having a long-term place to fill with love. My brother is living with me and my sister lives close by. We are all supporting each other to live independent lives.
Chris became homeless after he went through a number of challenges in 2019. He was depressed, drinking to isolate himself socially and he needed to move out of the family home.
“I moved into emergency accommodation based in a motel room. That was where I was living when we went into COVID lockdown. My mental health really took a dive, and I knew I need to work on myself.”
“I did this by cutting out the drink and focusing on art. I love to sketch and paint. I will sketch anything and everything. While my life improved doing these things, it was hard living with the uncertainty of not having a long-term home.”
“That has all changed now. I love living in a clean, fresh home. This has always been important to me. ‘A clean space keeps a happy face” When people visit, they often comment on how nice my place smells. I also like to fill my lungs with fresh air, and nice fragrances. Since moving in I have enjoyed having a garden and growing herbs and vegetables. The next goal is to find a job that I like.”
While I am grateful to have moved out of emergency accommodation, I do want to thank the management at Fern Motel, the last place I was living. They cater for everyone’s needs and are lovely people to all those who call the motel home for a period of time.”
Page updated: 16 April 2025
Source:
Media Release
“New Zealand women are being let down by systems and institutions that continue to disenfranchise them.” says National President of the National Council of Women of New Zealand (NCWNZ), Lisa Lawrence, who strongly believes there must be an urgent focus on creating equity which fosters equality, and supports everyone to reach their full potential.
“There is so much work going on to enable women and gender minorities, but there is more to do.” says Lisa Lawrence (Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāti Ruapani).
“The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is ‘Creating an Equal and Enabled World’ and that clearly resonates with us in Aotearoa New Zealand,” she says, “However the National Council of Women of New Zealand wants to see more and faster action.”
NCWNZ says creating an environment where everyone has the same opportunity is absolutely key, and that should be supported by everyone. “We must work together, walking alongside those who face inequalities and who are unable to access opportunities because of barriers they face. By making an environment equitable, inequalities are addressed. Those in the disability sector especially know this mahi is hard but the positive outcomes are life changing.” says Lisa Lawrence.
New Zealand women are being let down by systems and institutions that continue to disenfranchise them says NCWNZ.
“There is work to be done around poverty, homelessness and low pay, all of which disproportionately affect women. It’s deeply disappointing but not surprising that 63% of the female prison population is Māori. This is a direct result of a lack of equality and a lack of enabling behaviour by institutions.” says Lisa Lawrence.
However, there is a cause for celebration around the recent recognition of women at the New Zealander of the Year Awards. Dame Margaret Sparrow (Senior of the Year) is a champion of reproductive rights. Good Bitches Baking (Community of the Year) is literally a group of women set up to help others. Georgia Hale (Young New Zealander of the Year) already has a significant profile of work, helping others through charity drives and mentoring.
“All of these women have been recognised for their service to the community, and they serve a range of different communities. All of these women are working to create a more equitable and therefore more equal and enabled world. But isn’t that what we should all be doing?”
NCWNZ encourages people to get together and attend one of the many events around the country, or get together and watch the livestream of UN Women Aotearoa New Zealand and Zonta Club of Wellington’s International Women’s Day 2020 Breakfast from Parliament.
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Abortion: 66% of NZers agree that a woman should have the right to choose
New Zealand’s first Gender Attitudes Survey shows that 66% of New Zealanders agree that a woman should have the right to choose whether or not she has an abortion – while 14% disagreed.
A further 15% of New Zealanders were neutral and 5% didn’t know.
“We carried out this survey with Research New Zealand in late 2017 to get a snapshot of where we’re at in New Zealand on gender” says National Council of Women Chief Executive and Gender Equal NZ spokesperson Gill Greer.
“So what we’re seeing is that two out of three New Zealanders support women being in control of their own decisions around abortion.”
This is a true test of our national views on the issue, and supports the move to reform our out-dated laws. The comprehensive recent report by the Law Commission presents three legal models for treating abortion as a health issue.
“All three models remove abortion from the Crimes Act, which is an absolute necessity if we are to achieve a truly gender equal New Zealand.”
“Model A focuses most strongly on allowing pregnant people to be completely in control of their own decisions, lives and bodies – a basic right to which all New Zealanders should be entitled.”
“It would also work to remove the stigma and discrimination that surrounds abortion in New Zealand, by treating this issue as we would any other health issue.”
The National Council of Women, Gender Equal NZ’s lead organisation, supports the decriminalisation of abortion – and that abortion should be treated as a standard part of healthcare – safe, legal and accessible.
“It’s also important to acknowledge that trans and gender diverse people can also become pregnant and need access to abortion or other reproductive health services. We support increased access to these health services for all people” says Gill.
“It is time we recognised women, and all pregnant people’s, rights to autonomy, choice and freedom.”
More information on ‘One is not like the others’ image
The attached image was created by Ashlee Metcalfe from Massey University in paper 222.258 Visual Communication Design Studio IIB Ihi Wehi: Rhetoric and Persuasion.
The artwork was produced as a result of a partnership between Gender Equal NZ and Massey University.
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Ignorance is not bliss – context is everything
By Nina Herriman, Chief Storyteller
When I was a kid, they told me girls can do anything, and I believed them. I still do. That career as a top gun fighter pilot? Still on the cards. Every time I score a try at touch rugby, part of me waits for that call from Steve Hansen. (Narrator: Nina never scores a try at touch rugby.) Despite a lifetime of very honest feedback from my family on my musical abilities, I’m certain I could make it as a rock star .
So with decades of feminism under my belt, you’d think I’d know all the theories and arguments. Sadly not. You can’t help but learn something about gender, race and class when you do an Arts degree, but as far as gender theory goes, there’s not a lot that I remember. Michel Foucault got way too much air time, Judith Butler knew her stuff, and that’s about it.
My job is telling data stories about gender inequalities and I need to make sure those stories are grounded in context: in peoples lived experiences, intersectional feminist theory, and the theories and arguments about the particular areas of inequality.
I am a Pākehā, able-bodied, cis-gendered, heterosexual woman who lives in an urban centre. As with everyone else, these words are useful constructs that tell you something about my identity, but they’re only part of who I am. Our data stories use aspects of people’s identities as descriptions because we need them to understand different communities’ experiences of inequality, but these are imperfect descriptions and that’s why it’s so important to understand the context.
I keep going back to the importance of context when using data. It’s important for all data, but it’s particularly important for data about people. Because if you don’t have a really good understanding of the context, you risk talking about people in ways that are at best, disrespectful, and, at worst, damaging. Ignorance is most certainly not bliss.
My eclectic knowledge isn’t going to cut it. So how do I address that ignorance?
There’s lots of books and articles and reports to read, and lectures to go to or recorded panel discussions to view. I’m slowly making my way through some of them, focusing on those people sharing lived experiences from the perspective on those groups with compounding negative outcomes due to discrimination, e.g. Māori, Pacific, Asian, migrant and refugee women, rural women, women with disabilities, queer, trans and gender diverse people.
Here are a couple:
We held a workshop with expert advisors on economic independence in late 2017. We received 33 nominations for this workshop, from 17 member organisations or stakeholders. Those selected to participate represented a variety of community and advocacy groups, including unions campaigning on behalf of low-paid women workers, groups working with women in poverty and homeless women – as well as economists and analysts from Statistics NZ, Ministry for Women, the Human Rights Commission and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Ongoing conversations with these people have been important to the development of the Gender Dashboard, as well as with experts beyond this initial group of people. Our 200+ member organisations are an important avenue for these conversations.
The reality is that understanding inequalities in society and the solutions to them is a process of continual learning and re-examination. Fortunately, I love learning. And I work and for an organisation with staff, individual members and member organisations who can help me learn (and tell me when I’ve got it wrong).
Source:
Expressions Of Interest – Chief Executive, National Council of Women New Zealand (NCWNZ)
Expressions of Interest for the position of Interim Chief Executive are being invited from interested parties who have previous Chief Executive or interim management experience in the NGO sector.
A good understanding of intersectional feminism and gender equality and experience with media engagements is desired.
Focus areas for the role include: Fundraising, current liabilities, review of the President/Chief Executive role and communications management, HR/office and contracts management. Salary is commensurate with the responsibilities of the role.
Expressions of Interest must be forwarded to Vanisa Dhiru, President at: boardadmin@ncwnz.org.nz by 12noon on Thursday 11th October 2018, and include a current CV with cover letter outlining your interest in the role and your skills, attributes and relevant experience. This position is expected to commence shortly.
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Lies, damned lies and statistics? Telling accurate stories from data
By Nina Herriman, Chief Storyteller at the National Council of Women
In my last blog, I briefly mentioned the importance of accurate stories and promised to talk about how we’re going use the Gender Dashboard to tell accurate stories about gender inequality.
But first, let’s talk about why accuracy is about more than just testing that the numbers are right. Much of this resonates with the things I learned in my history degree. But I’ve resisted calling this post, “why you need an historian on your data science team”, because these are things that everyone working with and talking about data should know.
The data that we have can tell us something about now. Some good longitudinal data can tell us something about ten, twenty or, if we’re lucky, thirty years ago. It can’t tell us about the impact of centuries of inequalities on people’s lives today, whether that be on the basis gender, ethnicity, disability or something else.
Whether you’re writing a history book or a data story, you’re making choices about which stories to tell and consequently which stories that you won’t tell. This is partly driven by the information that you have available – and there are huge gaps in NZ data to inform our understanding of gender inequality.
For example, we will struggle to tell the story of trans women while data collection continues to be underpinned fail to recognise the fact that gender identity is not determined by the sex someone is assigned at birth.
Stats NZ have indicated a commitment to moving toward more inclusive data collection, but to tell these stories we will need to rely on the small number of non-government studies that have been done and international data.
It’s also about the story that you’re trying to tell. We’re producing a gender dashboard so this of course means that we are looking at gender data. But we need to make sure that we include other variables where we know there are inequalities to provide a more accurate story.
3. The data can’t speak for itself
It doesn’t matter if your data scientist has used the biggest computers and run the most sophisticated algorithms over all the data you can get your hands on, there’s still bias and there are still gaps in the data. Someone (or some committee) chose which data to collect and the process for collection, which data to keep and for how long, someone probably cleaned that data and/or it contains errors, someone wrote the algorithm and someone decided which results to report and how to report them.
Remember that rollicking good book you read about the politics and intrigue of sixteenth century England? That does not reflect the experience of most people who actually lived in sixteenth century England and their everyday lives.
It’s the same with data, particularly data about people and social change. Because as much as we’d quite like to change the world in a day, problems embedded in societal and institutional structures are hard and slow to change. So if you see a huge change in your data, there’s a good chance there’s an error somewhere and you should go back and check your analysis.
So, what’s the point then? How do we tell accurate stories from this data?
We tell stories from different perspectives about different groups of people who need different solutions. For example, there’s a narrative about more part-time work opportunities that allow people of all genders to have adequate resources or continue their career while fulfilling other responsibilities in their lives such as childcare and adult care.
There’s also a narrative about policies that allow people who work part-time to move into full-time work or at least more hours if they want or need it.
A third narrative may be about better pay and conditions for those who currently work part-time and wish to continue to do so.
And a fourth may be about more equal sharing of unpaid work, that allows those not in the labour force to take on part-time work.
As an umbrella organisation with over 200 member organisations and a reach of over 450,000 people, the National Council of Women have a lot of expertise to draw upon in our work. For each of our four key areas of inequality, we will have a group of expert advisors drawn from these people, as well as having conversations with experts beyond that group.
Consultation with stakeholders who are working with, or representing, the most marginalised communities in New Zealand will be given a high priority. We will endeavour to talk to the groups whose stories we want to tell – particularly those groups with compounding negative outcomes due to discrimination, e.g. Māori, Pacific, Asian, migrant and refugee women, rural women, women with disabilities, queer, trans and gender diverse women – “nothing about us, without us”.
Test that your infrastructure works, test that your numbers are right, test that your dashboard is easy to use, test that your website is easy to navigate, test that your stories resonate with your communities and stakeholders and test that your stories are useful!
In my next blog I’m going to explain a little further about context. Contextualising data is a major aim of the Gender Dashboard – we need to be able to show users what the data means, how the data connects and contextualise it within a narrative arc. Stay tuned!