While at the Teach For All annual conference Wendy took the opportunity to interview Dame Julia Cleverdon. Julia is the co-founder of Step Up To Serve, a UK charity coordinating the #iwill campaign to make social action part of life for 10- to 20-year-olds by 2020. The interview with Julia was filmed and is now published on our YouTube channel.

Background
On 17 October 2020 Wendy attended the final day of the Teach For All annual conference held in Auckland. The conference is powered by Teach First NZ and Teach For All. Teach First NZ is an innovative not-for-profit organisation that engages New Zealand’s top graduates and career-changing professionals to tackle educational inequality. Teach For All is the global network of organisations that run programmes similar to Teach First NZ and that share a vision for increased educational opportunity in their countries.

Wendy was first introduced to Dame Julia Cleverdon while on her sabbatical in late 2020. Wendy was researching organisations who focused on character education and met with Emma Taylor from Step Up to Serve. Emma is a research associate at the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues in the UK. Her research forms part of the Jubilee Centre’s pledge to Step Up To Serve. Before this, Emma worked on the Building Character through Youth Social Action research project, which explored how youth social action providers conceptualise character and virtues, and the virtues they believe young people develop through participating in such action.

Understanding the role of character in a talent-based economy forms part of our ongoing TalentNZ project. Check out the TalentNZ website for more information.

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