By Melanie Barr, Community Director, Shore Junction.
Shore Junction is a youth innovation hub being created in the heart of Takapuna. It is being designed as a space for young people to connect, belong, and grow. Shore Junction will offer youth-friendly facilities and integrated services that support innovation, learning, wellbeing and creativity, enabling young people to accelerate their potential and embark on their future pathways to success.
Birkenhead College students eagerly toured the pre-build Shore Junction facility last month, looking in all the corners as if they had already made themselves at home. Embracing everything, from the accidental connections space, music room, recording studio, to the tech zone and business and enterprise break out rooms.
"Everyone assumes we know what questions to ask and what we need to know for our future. We do not know, Shore Junction will help us figure out the unknown," – Hannah, Year 13, Birkenhead College
Ranged between Year 11 - 13, these young people understood immediately what Shore Junction was about and what it would offer. Enthusiastically asking about the different Pillars and Spaces housed in the building.
Following their tour, Mel visited Birkenhead College to host a focus group lunch with the same students. The young people were asked to think about what would attract them to become a member of Shore Junction and what barriers might exist that hinders them from visiting the space that we can overcome now, before we open.
It was unanimous that what AUT Millennium is for sports, Shore Junction will be for everything else. This group of Birkenhead College influencers are at a junction in their life where they are thinking about their future and career possibilities, they know they do not have the answers, but they also do not know what questions to ask.
They have dreams and passions - but how does that translate into a career. Their concerns weren't with school rivalries, the location or even if there was a membership cost (there isn't!), but more-so around monitoring equipment use, making sure no one was left out, and having the opportunity to speak with trusted adults who are experts in their field.
These impressionable and enthusiastic young people mirror Shore Junction's ethos and values, explaining that by attending, young people like them, who make the conscience decision to go to Shore Junction, will abide by an unwritten understanding about respecting peers, the building, equipment and staff.
