When I was 16 years old and 36 weeks pregnant, I stood at an ironing board, back aching, to take an Economics 101 exam. I shouldn't really have been allowed.
I'd dropped out of school at the end of Year 12 when I left foster care. I'd planned on returning for Year 13, until I fell pregnant with my daughter. I was living independently and had no family, so going to school was no longer an option for me.
But this man, my teacher Scott Haines, helped convince Lincoln University (NZ) to give me discretionary entrance to a first-year economics paper, and then he let me sneak onto school grounds twice a week to join his Year 13 students in a special class.
Thanks to my grade on that paper, I sweet-talked the University of Canterbury, at 17 years old with my 4-month-old baby on my hip, into letting me enrol, despite not having university entrance.
University blew my entire world open. I went on to a career as a policy analyst, then a management consultant, and have successfully run my own practice since I was 25. I've published two books (nearly three!) and worked with dozens of government and corporate clients across New Zealand and Australia.
My childhood was a story of abuse and addiction, and my adulthood might well have gone that way too. My sister died of a methamphetamine overdose at 20, leaving two children behind. That could have been me. I was lucky - and I had the right support at the right time.
The intervention of my Economics teacher didn't just change the trajectory of my life and career, it broke an intergenerational cycle. Today, almost 20 years later, my baby is studying Law in her first year of university. My other two children, 14 and 9, grow up in a happy and healthy home. They're safe, secure, and loved.
Today, I got to return a teeny-tiny piece of that support. I shared my deep gratitude for Hainsey on stage in front of over 200 secondary school principals before kicking off the Secondary Principals' Association of NZ - SPANZ conference in Queenstown as opening keynote speaker.
We're both pretty stoked about it, as you can see.
(PS: See how this blew up on LinkedIn?!)
