Shout Natural Leaders / Upper Hutt a Tree – $55
Sponsor a tree. Seed a future.
This is a youth-led food forest for the community, but it isn't much of a forest without trees. From the point in NZ history where we started clearing trees to support farming, our soils have been in decline, and our waterways have been degraded. We will pop off the planet, leaving Gen Z and Alpha and their descendants with the bill.
Natural Leaders are a group of Gen Alpha kids keen to learn how to leave the planet better than they found it. But the problem is they are time rich and money poor. They need support to make this happen.
They want to feed the community, and they are willing to do the mahi, but they need people to donate trees and gardening supplies.
For $55, you can sponsor a tree in our community food forest—an edible classroom where kids learn to grow kai, tend the earth, and care for each other.
Each tree you gift becomes part of a living ecosystem that feeds families, teaches resilience, and regenerates the land. It’s more than a tree—it’s shade, fruit, medicine, and a story waiting to grow.
Shout generations of mokapuna a tree today. $55. One tree. Lifetimes of impact.
Hear what RNZ Morning Report had to say about Natural Leaders.
How a bushcraft programme helped turn a 13-year-old life around
Funding WTFerks
This week, we found out that we were denied COGS funding — the Community Organisation Grants Scheme. We've been receiving this support since 2019, so this came as a shock.
When we spoke with the funders, the message was clear: funding is shifting toward ambulance-at-the-bottom-of-the-cliff situations — short-term crisis response. But here's the thing...
If we don’t invest in the work that prevents kids from falling off the cliff in the first place, we’re only creating more need for ambulances.
At Natural Leaders, we teach real-world, pragmatic life skills that young people aren’t learning while they’re plugged into devices. We help them reconnect to nature, their own resilience, and a sense of belonging. This isn’t just feel-good fluff — we’re actively diverting youth from the justice system, and even local police are coming to us for support.
And yet… no funding.
This is why we need your help more than ever. If you believe that prevention is more powerful than punishment, and that our kids deserve better than crisis-response-only care — please support us however you can.
Let’s stop throwing kids into the river — and start walking upstream together.