News & Events

It’s been a long time since our last update, thank you to so many of you who have been in touch over the past months - curious about what yMedia is planning this year.

The yMedia Challenge 2011?

As a team, we have made the difficult decision (there were tears!) not to run the yMedia Challenge in 2011.

Together, we grew the yMedia Challenge to new levels of success in 2010, contributing over half a million dollars worth of value back to the community (check out our Annual Report for the results). In the face of such success, we’ve decided to take this year to look closely at how we provide the most value back to you, our community.

It’s been four years since Pamela and Adele ran the very first yMedia Challenge, and though the event has evolved and grown since then, we are not sure that the event in its current form is making the best use of our resources to deliver back to our community.

While we may run the yMedia Challenge again in future, the hiatus of the event gives us the refreshing freedom to explore some exciting new avenues of bridging the gap - connecting students, community groups and our industry. 

Alumni continuing to impress

Since the wildly successful 2010 yMedia Challenge drew to a close last August, we have been proud to see alumni of the Challenge using the skills and experience they gained to get their foot in the industry door.

The Designasaurs, Challenge winners and favourite team to many last year, on account of their brilliant blog and thoughtful work for Natural Health Practitioners, have been working with Running with Scissors to deliver digital projects of a standard far beyond their experience. Well done girls!

To all yMedia Challenge alumni - we’d love to hear what you’re up to! Drop us a tweet,facebook message or plain old email any time.

Blossoming Careers

Not only have we had yMedia Challenge participants placed in great new positions, but several of our crew have landed exciting new roles.

Jade has graduated her Masters in Arts Management, and is working with The Church this year to run We Can Create. Anthea has taken up the role of Digital Development Manager for The Radio Network, Tim has joined Yellow as Agency Sales Co-ordinator, Emily is researching her family history for an Ashmolean Museum exhibition about her Uncle, the impressionist painter Pizzaro, and the list continues!

Opportunities

We’re always on the look-out for new opportunities to pass on and to promote, if you’re a student or freelancer be sure to check out the opportunities section of our blog. Community groups or businesses can list a volunteer or paid job opportunity on our blog for free by filling out this form.

Our first yMedia Birth!

On the 23rd of March this year, Pamela and her partner Ivan welcomed their beautiful baby girl, Mika Cruz into the world. Pamela has been in New Zealand to be with her friends and family as she adjusts to being a mama, and we’ve been delighted to have her company again these past months. If you’d like to keep up with their little family, follow their blog, Mi Vida Contigo.

Better late than never… Last night we had our first official meeting with the extended yMedia Crew – It was great to get everyone back together again, catching up with old friends, and welcoming new ones.

Many of us have had big changes/developments both professionally and personally over the past few months hence the quietness on the yMedia front. But the prize goes to (as if it was a Challenge itself) yMedia’s co-founder Pamela Minett and her partner Ivan Cruz – On behalf of the crew, would like to say a big CONGRATULATIONS on your beautiful baby girl, we can’t wait to meet Mika Cruz!

We’ll have a more comprehensive update out for you shortly with some key-dates to look forward to, but in the meantime there are a number of fantastic upcoming events and opportunities that we would like to share with our wider community before it’s too late.

NB: If you would like to connect with our community with any opportunities, jobs, events you have to offer – Simply fill out this form: http://bit.ly/yMediaOpportunities

The Lifewise Big Sleepout on 14 October, 65 business and community leaders swapped their creature comforts for cold concrete and ‘slept rough’ for one night – all to help LIFEWISE tackle homelessness.

After Team 9 (Dante, Guillym, Mark and Jeshua) in the yMedia Challenge produced the fundraising platform for the Big Sleepout (www.bigsleepout.org.nz), yMedia’s Jade Tang and Eddy Helm were inspired to take up the challenge.

During the long, but fortunately not too cold, evening, Lifewise painted the picture of homelessness in full; with dinner in the soup kitchen, stories from those who had been homeless themselves, a walk up to see the night shelter, and then after a cup of tea, the group settled in for a night on their cardboard bedding laid out on the concrete floor in an inner-city carpark.

The evening was humbling for all those involved, and truly highlighted that homelessness is everyone’s problem, and one which we need to solve together.

There is no government funding or national strategy to tackle this major social issue. LIFEWISE is taking action and working with other agencies to end street homelessness in Auckland by 2020.

It’s not just the people you see sleeping rough in alleyways or public parks. It’s estimated that thousands of Kiwis are struggling to find permanent housing. They’re the hidden homeless people forced to sleep on friends’ couches or floors, in carports or backyards, desperately seeking their own homes.

Homelessness is characterised by myths and misunderstanding. That makes fundraising for homeless support services a constant challenge.

Lifewise general manager John McCarthy said that the response exceeded expectations.

“With more than 60 business and community leaders as well as politicians sleeping on cardboard in a central city carpark, we were able to raise more than $95,000 towards a new venture, the Lifewise Hub”.

At the new LIFEWISE Hub, client support workers will support homeless people and help them move from the street or temporary housing into their own homes within the community.

yMedia Management crew member, and PR expert, Tim Holmberg reports back:

Last Wednesday marked the eighth and final workshop for this year’s yMedia Challenge and it was great to see a majority of the teams taking part in our “Room Full of Professionals”. For two hours we crammed a load of fantastic industry minds all into one room for our challenge participants to plumb for information, advice and help. The Challenge officially closes next Monday so this was the perfect opportunity for the students to get an industry opinion on their final touches and troubleshoot any issues that they have been having. With a diverse range of skills and knowledge, ranging from design to public relations to marketing to development, our students were in good hands and many of them were in deep discussion about their projects right until the end of the workshop. At the workshop we also had the extreme joy of handing out invitations to our yMedia Graduation Awards Dinner to all of the team members - We can’t wait to celebrate all of the astounding work that is being produced!