Well, that’s us, it’s been one busy year for Te Ohu Atawhai, the HBHS HEART Initiative! Opening the year, we took time to organise and centre ourselves with the core values of Visibility and Understanding to ground our work over the year. We’re extremely proud of everything we’ve achieved this year and would love to give a rundown of some of what we’ve managed to organise over 2023.

In Te Ohu Atawhai, the HBHS HEART Initiative’s own answer to the “Eurovision Song Contest,” HEART set out to unite rainbow groups from around Hamilton through trivia. At the Inaugural Inter-School Pride-Week Quiz, joined by rainbow groups and their support staff from St Paul's Collegiate, Waikato Diocesan, and Hamilton Girls’ High School, a vicious battle for Pride Week Trivia Supremacy took place. Facing questions like ‘Which queer mathematician is credited with cracking the “enigma code,”’ (it's Alan Turing, by the way) our very own Hamilton Boys’ team won the quiz, taking home the prize of getting to choose the charity which proceeds for the night would be donated to (Rainbow Youth) and winning HBHS the right to host the quiz next year. It was a brilliant event and we look forward to it being continued in the future!

This year for Mental Health Week, HEART ran a Mental Health Awareness Quiz from the 18th to the 22nd of September. Questions regarding mental health were placed around the school, and every answer put participants in the draw to win vouchers for movies or food and drink in Hamilton. We are really happy with the event and hope it encouraged a few more students to take time and consider their mental health and how to take care of it during a stressful mock exam period.

As part of the HBHS 10-Year Plan, we were thrilled to welcome the first of what we hope to be a repeat occurrence of Rainbow Speakers at our assemblies. This year, we welcomed The Waterboy with Lugtons who brought speakers to the Year 9 and 10 assemblies to discuss Rainbow identities and inclusivity in sports with the year groups. We think the talks were a great success and we are really excited to see what the future holds for Rainbow Speakers at HBHS assemblies.

As part of our yearly tradition, Te Ohu Atawhai, the HBHS HEART Initiative, flew a pride flag for Pride Day on the 28th of June. This year, we used our brand new Inclusivity Flag. On this new flag, the six-color rainbow is commonly used as a general pride flag, the black and brown stripes represent people of colour within the community, and the pink, blue and white stripes represent the Transgender Community. Flying this flag was a brilliant way to show HBHS’s acceptance and support for all members of the rainbow community.

We also celebrated Pink Shirt Day this year with a Bake Sale to raise funds for the Pink Shirt Day charity. With cakes, cookies and the hit of the day, shaved ice, we managed to raise a total of $220.59 to be shared between donations to the Mental Health Foundation and our HEART Fund. This was an overwhelming success for us as a group, being one of the most successful fundraisers we’ve ever held. Our stunning Instagram post celebrating this success can be seen at our Instagram page (@hbhsheart).

This year we had the unique opportunity presented to us to attend an event run by Rainbow Hub Waikato to meet other Rainbow Group leaders, discuss what we’ve been doing, learn about other groups' issues and the ways they’ve overcome them. This Hui was extremely helpful for us, not only in allowing us to meet other groups, but in allowing us to learn how we could better overcome the struggles we’ve faced and to share our own experiences. This meeting allowed us to network with other schools around Hamilton and organise more interschool events.

Rainbow Room is a safe space run by the HEART Initiative aimed at providing an accommodating space for all students at HBHS. This year we held a number of events for the Rainbow Room. Our personal favourite was “Dark Side of the Rainbow Room.” An event we held to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album. Accompanied by a brilliant slide show about the album, a truly soul-soothing experience was achieved listening to this album whilst lying still on the floor for 20 minutes. It’s our sincere hope that Rainbow Rooms like these may have in some small way enabled more students to feel like they have an available safe space at HBHS which organises activities that they can engage with should they ever want to.

Writing this yearbook article has encouraged us to think about how we feel, looking back at our time with the HBHS Heart Initiative. We’ve been co-leading HEART since 2022, taking over from Matthew Lee in 2021. While at times co-leading HEART has felt like a stressful challenge and played a significant role in the friendship breakdown of its co-leaders. I’m so proud that I can look back on my time with the Te Ohu Atawhai HBHS HEART Initiative as a time of both trying to serve my community and communities throughout the school. HEART has and always will be extremely important to me, it’s undeniably been a massive challenge to run the past two years that I’m thankful for. We know we’ve done all we could with the group in our limited run, but we do know there’s still so much more to be done in HEART’s mission to make HBHS an inclusive, accepting, and positive space for all students. Co-leading HEART has certainly been a unique experience, from the stress of organising events, to the various networking opportunities we have had as HEART Co-Leaders. Thank you to everyone who supported both of us in our time as Co-Leaders.

So, for the last time, thank you so much HBHS and everyone who’s helped us during our time as HEART Co-Leaders; you’ve shown us that we are all the heroes of our time.

XOXO

Gossip Girl (Your HEART Co-Leaders of 2023: Josef Gillgren and Wyatt Winke)