Creative Youth Fund

Youth Arts New Zealand is a creative social enterprise that connects, showcases and develops creative young New Zealanders. We are a youth-led registered charitable trust, with a vision to become a launchpad for young creatives around Aotearoa. Founded in 2017, YANZ has run as a self-funded non-profit and we are ready to make the jump to the next stage of our mission.

Can you help?

Through the Creative Youth Fund, you can help to provide creative opportunities to New Zealand’s youth.

Pre-COVID, we made ends meet through various live projects, but the nationwide lockdown dried up these revenue sources for us. We are raising $5k to cover our core costs, to ensure that we are able to increase the quality and quantity of creative opportunities for our nationwide youth community over 2020.

We are now moving into an exciting new period, launching a bunch of exciting initiatives to connect, showcase and develop young creatives as we emerge from this pandemic.

Here’s what we’re up to in 2020!

• Building our youth creative internship programme;
• Expanding our paid work opportunities available to young creatives (performances, showcase opportunities and more);
• Holding regular connection and networking events for our community to learn about and support each other;
• Establishing educational programmes and resources aimed at providing young creatives with tools to further their creative careers.

Some of our favourite projects so far:

• Te Kahui: A creative writing programme in Mt Eden Corrections Facility for young inmates.
• Apollo Night: YANZ mentored 2 Auckland students to bring their youth poetry and music showcase to life.
• ATEED Youth Working Group: We held a strategy session with our youth creative community to provide ATEED with advice on how to make Auckland an awesome creative city for our rangatahi.
• Summer at 38 Hurstmere: We created 15 events over summer that showcased young creatives in partnership with placemaking organisation Fresh Concept; including a youth music showcase, live art portraits for the public, and a youth art exhibition.

In 2019, we:

• Worked directly with over 50 young creatives
• Provided our community with over $5k in paid work opportunities
• Delivered over 20 events and projects showcasing young creatives
• Had over 1000 people attend our event

We’re ready to smash this out of the park in 2020 - but we need your help! If you can, please donate to our Boosted campaign in our mission to raise $5k. Every little bit counts!

Our Boosted Campaign

We are hosting a range of live performances and interactive virtual events from our talented youth creative community, including music, visual art, dance and poetry. This begins on launch night, Friday 15th May, with 3 talented acts, and more performances scheduled over the next 30 days. Check out our social channels to keep updated @youthartsnz!

Want to know more about YANZ? Head to www.youtharts.co.nz for more info.