By placing 54 Chromebooks into the hands of students in need, the Rotary Club of Pāpāmoa is helping bridge the digital divide and creating brighter educational opportunities for young people across Pāpāmoa and Te Puke.

In the heart of Pāpāmoa and Te Puke in New Zealand, a simple but powerful movement has been unfolding – one sparked not by grand speeches or sweeping reforms, but by a simple question: What will help our young people flourish at school?

Teachers at Pāpāmoa College and Te Puke High School had an answer. They spoke about students eager to learn but held back by a modern barrier: the lack of a personal device in an increasingly digital world.

Some students are sharing computers in classrooms and others need a loaned take-home device to support homework and assessments. Research, online lessons, communication – so much of school life now depends on technology and for some families, a computer is simply out of reach.

The Rotary Club of Pāpāmoa listened. And then acted.

Rotary’s role in protecting a species on the brink. Rotarians swapped boardrooms for bushland in the Barrington Tops, rolling up their sleeves to support Aussie Ark’s mission to protect the endangered Tasmanian Devil through hands-on conservation work.

Rotary in action took on a distinctly hands-on and slightly muddy form recently, as District 9660 Governor Evan Burrell joined fellow Rotarians for a working weekend in the wild, with a visit to Aussie Ark in the Barrington Tops of New South Wales.

Accompanied by District 9660 Governor Nominee Peter Comino and members from the Rotary Clubs of Morisset and East Maitland, they stepped well outside the traditional Rotary setting of meetings and formalities or slinging sausages. Instead, the group immersed themselves in practical conservation work, contributing directly to one of Australia’s most significant wildlife protection initiatives.

From an interview with Helena that has been edited

We sell collectables like books, chinaware, records and sheet music.

I run a stall at the Bentleigh market and it is still there. That market has been around for forty years, and it’s an incredibly important local institution.

Helena’s Curiosity Shop is an extension of what I was – and am – doing there. My nana was always collecting, so I think that it is in our blood. It is a shared love, and we have always sold a bit of everything.

Since we have been here the arcade has changed quite a lot.